Our View - Friday

No holds barred

Salazar’s antics are arrogant, unproductive

It’s irrational for Sen. Ken Salazar to demand that the Bureau of Land Management hold off on a drilling plan for Colorado’s Roan Plateau, while simultaneously blocking confirmation of the person nominated to head the agency. The BLM is less able to respond to such petulant demands, after all, if there’s no one in charge.

And it’s laughable to hear the U.S. Senate trumpeted as the “world’s greatest deliberative body” when one senator, using an unwritten “rule” of uncertain origin, can unilaterally halt the confirmation process, leaving a major federal agency leaderless, in order to extort concessions from the executive branch. And we call this democracy?

But that’s the scene unfolding in Washington, where Salazar has placed a “hold” on the nomination of James Caswell to head BLM, in an effort to derail drilling on the Roan. Salazar isn’t just trying to end-run years of study and public process that went into the plan, in a pander to gang green, but he’s taking on some of the worst attributes of pompous Senate colleagues in the process. Mark your calenders, folks: the seduction of Ken Salazar is officially complete.

“Fires are burning across the west and BLM needs a confirmed captain at its helm to ensure an adequate response to public land concerns across the country,” Sen. Wayne Allard said in statement urging action on Caswell’s nomination. But that can’t happen until Salazar says so.

Salazar called on Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to shelve the drilling plan and avert a “train wreck.” He says he objects to BLM “running roughshod over the Roan Plateau and Colorado’s public lands.” He wants Gov. Bill Ritter to have more “meaningful input” into energy development in the state.

But that’s as phony as the cowboy hat Salazar wears when home on holiday.

The “train wreck” wouldn’t be occurring if Salazar, Ritter and other Democrats weren’t further politicizing a process that should be decided on the science, on the law and on the merits. The drilling plan for the plateau is the product of an elaborate and lengthy public process (in which the BLM bent over backward to draw up a light-on-the-land approach). But the anti-drilling faction didn’t get everything it wanted, and is unwilling to compromise, so it enlisted Salazar, Ritter and other Democrats in an 11th-hour intervention.

We, too, believe states should be more closely consulted on major land management decisions (and, in fact, would like to see most federal lands turned over to state or local control). But Salazar and other Democrats lack any credibility posing as neo-federalists, since they apply these concepts selectively, raising doubts about their sincerity.

Salazar says Ritter should be able to intervene in drilling decisions involving the Roan. But would he have taken the same position if Ritter’s Republican predecessor wanted to override federal policy involving endangered species, forest management practices or clean water laws? Of course not. And how does this states’ rights rhetoric square with the wellknown preference of Democrats and environmentalists for centralizing power and decision-making in Washington?

The inconsistencies are glaring — and suggest that politics, rather than core principle, is motivating Salazar’s sudden embrace of neo-federalism.

And just a word about “holds.” Although it has unfortunately become commonplace, the practice of one senator halting all action on a nomination or piece of legislation, and holding them hostage to his or her whims, should be condemned and banned. Placing holds “is nowhere recognized in Senate rules or precedents” according to the Senate’s own Web site, so it isn’t really a Senate rule at all, but an anti-democratic aberration that would undoubtedly offend the Founders.

Holds have no other purpose than to inflate the egos of the Senate’s many headline hounds. Unless he wants to be counted among them, Salazar ought to find a more democratic means of making his points.

Follow the money

If lawmakers are really worried about border security, they sure aren’t putting their money where their mouths are. Congress allocated $747 million to 50 U.S. cities in its latest round of anti-terrorism funding, and just like previous allocations, the money isn’t going where it’s likely to do the most good.

Of the 50 cities that received funding, only four are actually on the borders (not including coastal cities or those along the Great Lakes). The total going to those four cities is about $42 million. The remaining $700 million is going the same way most pork-barrel allocations go, distributed by formula or funneled into the districts of the most powerful legislators. More than half of the total — $410 million — is targeted for seven cities: New York ($134 million), Los Angeles ($72 million), the District of Columbia ($62 million), Chicago ($47 million), Newark ($36 million), San Francisco ($34 million) and Houston ($25 million).

To be sure, terrorists can strike anywhere. But when the halls of Congress are filled with alarmists, who continue to call for a wall along our southern border to prevent the infiltration of terrorists, wouldn’t it be logical to expect more of the homeland security money to go to border towns and border security? All efforts in Congress to establish a methodical, threatbased approach to allocating these funds have gone nowhere.

Instead, Congress treats homeland security money like all other discretionary funds, as members elbow each other aside trying to pocket as much as they can. Today, apparently, evoking “homeland security” has become the first refuge of the scoundrel.