Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, who was born in Michigan, became governor of Massachusetts, and ran for president of the United States in 2012, may consider himself a national figure. Given his years as a missionary in France, his success spearheading the 2002 Winter Olympics, and his ability to jet-set the world, perhaps he could be considered an international figure. Nonetheless, he is the junior senator from the Beehive State in the Rocky Mountain West. Unfortunately, his infamous op-ed in the Washington Post belies recognition on his part that he has a new constituency whose world view differs from his.
Allow me to speak for some of them — many of whom have been, if not my clients, then like those I have represented in court over the decades.
Romney argues that “policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.” Nope, not for those of us in the West who have suffered for decades from the “wars on the West” waged by Democratic Presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama — unfortunately always left unresolved by their Republican successors, Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. For us in the West, words are meaningless; action in the form of “policies and appointments” is all that matters.
In 1996, in Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, Clinton, surrounded by leaders of national environmental groups and Robert Redford, issued a decree creating the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. Not a single elected official from Utah was present; all were told a decision on the monument had not been made.
Meanwhile, Clinton was hanged in effigy in Kane County, which along with neighboring Garfield County, were two of Utah’s poorest counties and were soon to become, thanks to Clinton’s decree, economic disaster areas. Then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush campaigned against Clinton’s job-killing decree, but his administration defended its legality in court and left it unchanged.
President Trump, on the other hand, ordered a review of all national monument decrees over the last two decades, reduced the size of Clinton’s Utah monument and another egregious one issued by Obama, and defended his actions in federal court. Utahns cheered.
It has been years since a mountain Westerner and decades since a Utahn served on the Supreme Court (Justice Byron White of Colorado retired in 1993, and Justice George Sutherland of Utah retired in 1938). Prior to Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, the highest court in the land was a “bi-coastal SCOTUS,” with six justices from New York or New Jersey (three from New York City), one from rural, coastal Georgia, and two from northern California (Sacramento and San Francisco). Little wonder Westerners pondered whether they could get a hearing (the court grants certiorari in only 1 percent of the petitions it receives), let alone a fair one on the obscure issues they face, such as the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the Mining Law of 1872, or the Endangered Species Act.
Then, Trump appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch, a highly regarded appellate judge, fourth-generation Coloradoan, and son of President Ronald Reagan’s first Environmental Protection Agency administrator. Gorsuch immediately ordered his clerks to read all petitions to ensure that cases important to him and the West will be reviewed.
The lawlessness of the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in their application of the Clean Water Act’s Waters of the United States rule to seize private property is well-known to westerners. In 1992, during the tenure of the self-proclaimed “environmental president,” George H.W. Bush, the EPA declared my client’s arid land “wetlands” and threatened him with fines of $125,000 a day. Such agency mischief was ubiquitous, got worse when Democrats were in charge, and never improved when Republicans took office; in fact, federal lawyers working for both Bushes defended these illegal land grabs.
Enter Trump. He eschewed half-hearted measures to rein in the agencies, issued an executive order to end the “WOTUS” madness, and publicly mentioned another of my clients, Andy Johnson, whose treatment by the EPA was so outrageous that it inflamed Sens. Mike Enzi and John Barrasso. As Trump said:
I wonder, had my client ranched not in Fort Bridger but 50 miles west in Wahsatch, Utah, if Romney would have been as incensed by the EPA’s treatment of him as he is by Trump’s tweets?
When it comes to the West, President Reagan (the “Sagebrush Rebel”) set a high mark with his “policies and appointments.” So far, President Trump has done much to match Reagan’s remarkable record on both scores. He deserves credit, not condemnation.
William Perry Pendley (@Sagebrush_Rebel) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is an attorney and the author of Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan’s Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today (Regnery, 2013).
