Trump’s Signing of Huge Wilderness Bill Continues Bipartisan Clinton-Bush-Obama War on the West…(1st Attack…)
by William F. Jasper
TheNewAmerican.com
Thursday, 28 March 2019
To the surprise of many, President Trump has signed the nation’s largest wilderness preservation legislation in a decade. In a move that has elated enviro-activists and is certain to dumbfound and anger many of his stalwart supporters, the president signed a massive package of public lands legislation that had rolled together more than 100 individual bills that were pet projects of a bipartisan array of more than 50 U.S. Senate and House members.
Among the big ticket items in the mammoth bill — and sure to be the most controversial — is the designation of 375,000 new acres of wilderness across Utah, California, New Mexico, and Oregon. Moreover, the newly enacted legislation provides a grab bag of goodies for just about everyone, with new and expanded national parks, scenic areas, wild and scenic rivers, scenic trails, historical sites, heritage areas, monuments, battlefields, and much more in Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Arizona, Mississippi, Alaska, New York, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, South Dakota, South Carolina, and other states. The bill passed the Senate on February 12 by a vote of 92 to 8 and the House of Representatives on February 26 by a vote of 363 to 62. It was signed by President Trump without comment on March 12.
Originally titled the National Resources Management Act, the bipartisan bill (S. 47) was renamed the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management and Recreation Act in honor of Rep. Dingell (D-Mich.), who died in February at the age of 92. He is the longest-serving member of Congress in American history, serving as representative of Michigan’s 12th, 15th, or 16th districts from 1955-2015. A liberal-left Democrat, Dingell earned only a cumulative 22 percent constitutional rating on The New American’s Freedom Index.
The bill, which prohibits logging, mining, drilling, road construction, and other activities on hundreds of thousands of acres of newly designated “public lands,” conflicts sharply with the pledges by Candidate Trump to reverse the trend of the Clinton-Bush-Obama legacies of federal land grabs, locking up our natural resources, and restricting human access to public lands.
In the February 11, 2016 article “The Federal Bootprint” The New American pointed out that the federal government already “owned,” at that time, more than 640 million acres of “public lands,” most of which are concentrated in the 12 western states (Alaska, Washington, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, California, Wyoming, New Mexico, Montana, and Colorado).
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