by John G. Lankford
[email protected]
(205) 665-7746

August 20, 2002

When Congress returns from recess in September, the Interior Department will squirm.

In an autumn when many see the federal government as an overbloated monster in meltdown, when more are uneasy due to the War on Terrorism and the problematic economy, and westerners are enraged over record forest fires, that department has managed to don a flashing neon sign reading Kick Me.

For a decade and more, Congress has both appeased and exploited citizen anger by calling top officials of government bureaus on the carpet in televised hearings, scolding them fiercely for public consumption and later quietly raising their budgets. In 1994, the Departments of Education, Energy and Commerce were under assault. The Environmental Protection Agency was an advertised target. Later, grandstanders attacked the Treasury Department's Internal Revenue Service. All survived and indeed prospered, but they did so in quieter times.

The Interior Department was traditionally a tranquil fief, taking care of the nation's parks and much other federal real estate and handling relations with Indian tribes. But it was gradually infiltrated by fervent environmental absolutists, and their antics have made it a laser-sighted target as a close and hard-fought off-year election approaches.

From September until November's election, Congressmembers not grandstanding for themselves will be doing so for their parties, seeking ways to break the virtually even power split in government. Because people vote more readily against than for, they will be jostling to be seen as champions of the righteously indignant. The Interior Department is emerging as the season's most conspicuous single object of anger, and there is no compelling national need that it survive. Almost all it does, states can do.

There is a mammoth state-federal Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project floundering in Florida, one that has cost and will cost billions. There is a little patch of slightly high ground on the edge of the Everglades National Park, officially designated the 8.5 Square Mile Area. Gardeners, small-plot farmers, and shopkeepers live there. Some claim and others deny it obstructs part or all of the Everglades Project.

For nearly two decades, Congress has held it does not and provided that it would be protected from Everglades waters raised by the Project by a little levee-and-canal system. The Army Corps of Engineers was to build that and the Interior Department's National Park Service was to pay the federal share of its cost from money Congress appropriated. But the little flood protection system was not built, the Project was augmented and modified, and the Park Service always refused to release the money for the Area's flood protection. The Service wants to buy it, voluntarily if possible and by eminent domain if necessary. To that agency the inhabitants are virtual though not literal inholders, owners of private property surrounded by national park or forest.

In order to get on with the vast Everglades Project, the Corps of Engineers acquiesced and signaled intent to proceed with its Alternative 6D. That is a compromise plan that would acquire part of the Area as a park buffer and protect the rest. It assumes ground water will forbear to seek its own level in the protected part, or pumps to overcome seepage would be adequate and their operation affordable.

But Area residents sued and won a federal district court judgment holding Congress had never intended to authorize eminent domain buyouts in the Area, and Alternative 6D could not proceed. In exasperation or churlishness, the Engineers last week declared the entire Everglades Project at a halt.

The plight of the residents, whose land is often and, they charge, deliberately flooded by Project-elevated waters, drew the attention of the Paragon Foundation. Having caused revision or reversal of the Interior Department's Park Service and Bureau of Land Management programs in Klamath Falls, Oregon, Elko County (Jarbridge River), Nevada, and Darby, Ohio, Paragon made the Area its next campaign. The foundation and allies declared a "Sawgrass Rebellion" and scheduled a two-branch, transnational caravan scheduled to end in a rally near the Area October 17-19.

The Interior Department's 2003 funding bill (HR 5093), passed by the House and ready for floor debate and vote in the Senate, is the subject of a tug-of-war between federal land-taking advocates and private property protectors in Congress. A clause that would annul the federal court's decision and mandate the Engineers' building the 6D Alternative without delay and notwithstanding any other provision of law was inserted in committee in the House, but struck before passage and referral to the Senate. Florida Senator Bob Graham (D) is considering an effort to restore the clause.

To aggravate the imbroglio, that bill is one means eyed by western Congressmembers seeking expedited firefighting, fire-damage relief and future fire prevention funding. There is pressure to pass it quickly, one reason it was not referred to committee in the Senate.

If Graham succeeds, the House may not pass the bill. If it does, the President may not sign it. If he does, he will vindicate years of bureaucratic defiance of Congress. But Bush has just announced a veto of a $5 billion supplemental appropriations bill he considers profligate. By way of his Homeland Security initiative, he is trying to restore subordination of some of the executive branch's bureaucracies to the president. Interior has made itself another candidate for deep reform or dissolution.

Interior's Bureau of Indian Affairs is scrambling to explain the disappearance of as much as $10 billion in Indian trust funds.

Now its Park Service has galvanized property rights defenders again with studies looking to the eminent-domain taking of almost 336 square miles of Santa Barbara County, California to add a provisionally-named Gaviota National Park to the Channel Islands National Park and the Point Reyes National Seashore already existing thereabouts.

Among those furious are the formidable American Land Rights Association and Darby, Ohio struggle veteran Julie Smithson. In a comment letter filed as part of the park proposal study, Smithson compassed the dissolution of the Park Service and the Interior Department.

The president and many Congressmembers may agree. One tacit bureaucratic commandment forbids provoking passionate issues near election time: If electoral politicians want people stirred up, they will do the stirring. Thanks to blundering, cavalier overzealousnenss and political ineptitude at Interior, Smithson may get her wish.

John G. Lankford retired from law practice in 1993. He contributes to SierraTimes.Com, AldenChronicles.com, KeepAndBearArms.com, and is principal essayist on RadicalPositivism.org.