By Carlotta Grandstaff, Hamilton
In a recent letter to the Star, George Corn rightly called out Sen. Steve Daines as a moral coward for his deafening silence on a U.S. Intelligence agencies’ report of Russian bounties on the heads of American soldiers in Afghanistan.
To the charge of moral cowardice, I can add another count.
Three years ago, Daines urged Ravalli County Commissioners to write a letter of support for Daines’s (and Rep. Greg Gianforte’s) ultimately unsuccessful congressional bill to release wilderness study areas to certain exploitation and degradation, including the two wilderness study areas totaling 101,974 acres in the Bitterroot. The Commission wrote the letter of support without soliciting public comment, claiming without a shred of evidence that an “overwhelming majority” of Bitterrooters support a reduction of wilderness study areas.
Several months later, in February 2018, Daines, still working to garner support for his bill behind closed doors without the support or the input of his constituents, appeared in Hamilton, with no public announcement. His goal, apparently, was to meet with OHV and ORV riders to garner their support.
Several of us in the Bitterroot and Missoula caught wind of his unannounced appearance in Hamilton and showed up to confront him about his bill which would have had profound negative impact on Montana’s environment but which had no public involvement in its creation.
When his constituents showed up at the motorcycle shop where he was appearing, Daines ducked out the back door to avoid his fellow Montanans who wanted to confront him about his bill and the sneaky way he went about promoting it. Constituents successfully avoided, he then jumped into a waiting vehicle out back and hightailed it back to Missoula.
Talk about moral cowardice.
The opponents of the Daines-Gianforte wilderness study area release bill launched a mighty and ultimately successful effort to kill it.
But preservation of a political career, especially one tied so tightly to an unpopular, incompetent, mean-spirited president who’s been swirling down into the swamp from day one, is a powerful thing, and Daines recently tried to prove his wildlands bona fides by supporting the Great American Outdoors Act. (That’s the one signed into law by the president last August at a public meeting at which Trump referenced Yosemite National Park, mispronouncing it “Yo Semite.”)
This naked election year stunt gets America full funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund and $9.5 billion to address the maintenance backlog at American national parks. Great. Thanks Sen. Daines, we’ll take it, but we also recognize it for what it is: an attempt to buy our votes by a U.S. senator who knows full well that Montanans revere their public lands, that there is no “overwhelming” support for exploiting them for their riches, and that Montanans will fight to protect them, even as our U.S. Senator works against us. Don’t be fooled by Daines’s phony 11th hour support for public lands; if he is reelected, count on him to resume his legislative attack on wilderness study areas.
Meanwhile, Gov. Steve Bullock quietly and competently scored a major court victory for the protection of public lands. The result of Bullock’s lawsuit was the long-overdue removal of William Perry Pendley from the post of Director of the Bureau of Land Management where the court found Pendley had been serving illegally without the required Senate confirmation. Pendley, some of you may remember, was the director of the Mountain States Legal Foundation which spawned public lands foe Karen Budd-Falen, and which launched an unsuccessful attack on Montana’s stream access law, among other egregious acts so well laid out by Paul Kink in his excellent Sept. 30 letter to the Star.
The choice for the U.S. Senate is clear: a moral coward who remains silent while Russia pursues bounties on American soldiers, and who sneaks behind his constituents’ backs to sell out their public lands; or an actual defender of public lands with a major court victory to prove it.
Steve Bullock for the U.S. Senate – and for public lands – is the clear choice.