In GOP Chaos, There May Be Hope For Public Lands

A call for cautious optimism as Republican politicians begin to panic

A region-wide war in the Middle East with no plan, no goal, and no end in sight. American service members coming home in bodybags without Congressional authorization. A Department of Justice breaking the law in order to cover up credible allegations the President raped a 13-year old. American citizens getting murdered in broad daylight by masked government thugs. A collapsing economy. Once rare diseases spreading like wildfire. Any one of these things would have been an administration-ending scandal just a short time ago. But at least it’s looking like all of that is going to lead to a GOP wipeout in the mid-terms (should we have free and fair elections), and that’s already causing prominent Republican politicians to begin announcing their retirements. Here’s what all that means for stuff like public lands.

I’m going to keep today’s newsletter pretty short, since I’m flying United, and I’ve got to focus on being a good passenger so they don’t have security beat me up. Depending on whether or not their spotty WiFi works, I may be able to add links and images, or I may not.

Five Alarm Fire For Montana Republicans

Earlier this week, one of the most corrupt politicians ever—stinky Zinke—announced he wouldn’t seek reelection for his seat in the House of Representatives. Some racist, militia-adjacent podcast bro that only fellow racist, militia-adjacent podcast bros have ever heard of threw his hat in the ring.

We are in no shortage of truly heinous Republican politicians in this state. Sadly, that’s relevant to the rest of the country because Montana politicians have an outsize voice in making public land policy.

One of the most heinous of those is our Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen, who has dedicated her entire career to preventing Montanans from voting. Apparently without consulting any of her fellow party members, she also decided to run for Zinke’s seat. Guess she has some insight into all the voter suppression measures that will be applied to our elections this fall, and thinks they’ll come together to give her some sort of advantage over that racist podcast bro. Can’t wait to see what those are!

Jacobsen was supposed to run for Governor in 2028, when Greg Gianforte’s term is up. If you haven’t hear of that guy, he believes that a Tyrannosaurus Rex once told Jesus to tell him to hate anyone who isn’t a straight white guy, which is strange, because Greg owns the largest collection of physically-accurate male nude sculptures west of the Mississippi. Dude loves a giant dick.

Jacobsen’s pivot borks that plan, so scuttlebutt among Montana Dems is that Daines is being tapped to pick up the slack. He announced he was quitting the Senate only eight minutes before the filing deadline, then a sentient bowl of milquetoast filed for it four minutes later.

This is all good in the sense that everyone mentioned above is corrupt, hateful, and dedicated to the Republican cause of stealing from working people in order to give to billionaires. And in the sense that we have some pretty strong Democrats running this year, and whoever wins those primaries suddenly has better chances of success in the general. Yay.

But the good news ends there. It’d be hard to pick two politicians more dedicated to the cause of stealing your land than Zinke and Daines. The former is responsible for ordering the largest reductions in public land protections ever, while the latter was one of the architects of the effort to sell off 3.3 million acres of public land as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. And now that neither has to worry about voter sentiment in the mid-terms, they may feel like they’ve got a free pass to wreak as much destruction as possible between now and January.

How much harm can they do? Well Zinke is a complete moron who has no friends in the party, so likely very little other than voting on his part. The problem is that Daines is neither a moron nor without considerable power. Remember he’s one of the boosters championing Steve Pearce’s nomination to run the BLM, has dedicated his entire career in the Senate to eliminating Montana’s very important Wilderness Study Areas, and is a supporter of Chile’s efforts to destroy Minnesota’s Boundary Waters in order to boost China’s power grid.

Oh, and our junior Senator, noted gun-safety advocate Tim Sheehy, managed to break the arm of a uniformed Marine exercising his First Amendment right to free speech at the U.S. Capitol yesterday. And he managed to do that on camera. It seems likely that Sheehy may find himself suddenly plagued by injuries he earned while shooting himself in the arm with a single-action revolver at a National Park, then lying to a federal law enforcement officer about it, and needing to retire from his seat in order to pursue surgical correction of his hatred for the Indigenous people of his state.

As you can probably tell, the GOP is already scraping the bottom of the barrel to find candidates to prop up with dark money here, and it is not likely a special election will go their way amid all the pedophilia and bodybags and stuff.

No Vote Scheduled For Boundary Waters Destruction

The Senate has until the end of April in order to vote on whether or not to destroy the nation’s most popular wilderness in order to boost the economy of an economic adversary. Even though they’re using the Congressional Review Act to do it, and only need a simple majority as a result, they’re apparently struggling to come up with the necessary votes. It’s almost as if one or two Republicans would like to hang onto their seats in November!

CRA Comes For Grand Staircase-Escalante

Believe it or not, but all of this is related. GS-E is one of the two National Monuments in Utah Zinke shrunk while accidentally wearing a cowboy hat backwards. And Steve Daines is the guy responsible for pioneering the use of the Congressional Review act to repeal public lands management plans he doesn’t like, a move that he does not appear to fully understand the consequences of.

Representing the Utah district surrounding GS-E is a Representative you’ve never heard of before—Celeste Malloy. Last summer, she saw Daines getting all hot and bothered about the CRA and figured she’d see if she could use it as a means to screw her constituents too. She did that by soliciting a legal opinion on whether or not the CRA could be used to break the management plan in GS-E.

The result was affirmative, and Mike Lee jumped on that opportunity to introduce a resolution to do just that.

This will be the first time the CRA is applied to management plan within a National Monument, and that sets up a troubling precedent because a) Republicans are drunk on power with this maneuver since it lets them wreck shit on a simple majority in the Senate, and b) if there’s anything Republicans hate more than the American people, it’s a National Monument.

Now don’t sweat too much if you’re just a normal American who likes visiting Monuments because they’re pretty. Revoking a Monument designation altogether would take 60 votes in the Senate, and Republicans don’t have those. All they’ll be able to do is revoke the plans on which all permits within those Monuments are based, thereby undoing the legal basis for all commercial operation in them. That means everything from oil drilling, to livestock grazing, to guiding. And since they’re using the CRA so widely, all of the resulting legal cases are going to back up in courts for years if not decades.

That outcome is also bad. Commercial operations on America’s public lands generate hundreds of billions of dollars each year, offsetting the taxes we pay, employing millions of Americans, and generally doing the whole capitalism thing. By breaking that, all of these assholes are choosing to screw over everyone from oil companies to independent ranchers, all while making our national debt crisis even worse than Trump is managing on his own.

And while that sucks, if there’s a better way to kick Republicans out of power for an entire generation, I can’t think of it.

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, and prepare for real life.