Mike Lee Reintroduces Smaller Public Land Sell Off Proposal

Despite broad consensus that he’s a douchebag, Mike Lee just won’t give up

After the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that a measure to sell off up to 3.3 million acres of public land didn’t meet requirements for budget reconciliation, Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) has gone back to the drawing board and come back with a new, slimmer proposal to only sell up to 1.2 million acres, this time within 5 miles of “population centers.” The measure also drops language that would have made much larger swaths of land eligible for future sale.

Here’s Lee’s proposal in full:

Draft Text

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We see in this section that Lee is still defining the ultimate amounts of land in percentages. Now down from a maximum .75 percent of 245 million acres to no more than .50 percent of BLM’s total acreage. USFS land is not included in this proposal.

This version still exempts any land in Montana, indicating that Lee has either struck, or hopes to strike a backroom deal with Montana Senators Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy, and maybe even with Montana House reps Ryan Zinke and Troy Downing (all Republicans).

This new version still exempts lands that hold other forms of federal protection and places that have “valid existing rights,” which everyone’s reading to mean existing extraction leases.

This new version of the proposed amendment to the Senate budget is clear about also exempting lands on which grazing permits are currently written.

The other big change is that Lee is proposing to only sell lands located within 5 miles of the border of a population center (which may be read as towns with 2,500 or more residents). There’s a lot of wiggle room here when it comes to defining where those borders lie, and how you define the location of an area of land to be sold. Assuming a worst case scenario, the nearest border of a tract of land would need to lie within 5 miles of the nearest border of a “population center,” however that is defined.

Lee is inserting that rider to double down on the lie that these sales will be conducted to foster the construction of affordable housing. I’ve written about that at length previously, so let me just make two quick points:

1. Lee’s HOUSES act, on which this is based, contains no provision for affordability, or even that lands need be used for the construction of buildings. It could just as easily permit the construction of private golf course as it could a cheap apartment complex, but the most likely outcome is simply McMansions.

2. Public lands within 5 miles of a population center are prime areas for outdoor recreation. This is where the most popular trails, fishing access, and other areas used for recreation will invariably be located. According to preliminary analysis conducted by the Outdoor Alliance, there’s, “significant overlap between recreation areas and lands that could be sold. From hiking trails to climbing crags, from mountain bike routes to rivers, the places we love could be at risk.”

This is illegal, and may be one of the reason the parliamentarian ruled against the earlier proposal. According to the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act, revenues from the sale of BLM lands must remain with the BLM for use on public land.

The rub there is that Lee is trying to sell off public lands in order to offset the cost of providing billionaires with tax cuts. The purpose of the Republican party is to steal from the poor and give to the rich, even when that’s expressly forbidden by law.

Lee is trying to win over hunters with this one. Good luck with that one big guy. There’s unified, cohesive opposition to the sale of any public land across the outdoor world.

This is a breaking story, I’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, call your Senator, and tell them you demand that Mike Lee update his official Senate photo to reflect the fact that all of his hair has now fallen out.

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