The Art of the Political Deal by Jill Lawrence

Author:Jill Lawrence
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: politics, government, veterans, budget, democrats, republicans, congress, food stamps, partisanship, political negotiation
Publisher: Jill Lawrence

CASE STUDY THREE

A PUBLIC LANDS PUZZLE WITH HUNDREDS OF PIECES

The federal government owns more than half the land in the West, and that makes Congress its real-estate agent. If you want to mine, drill, graze, log or build on federal land, you have to ask Congress. Likewise if you want to add new wilderness areas, parks, or wild and scenic rivers.

Clashes have always been inevitable, given the competing priorities of conservatives and liberals, developers and environmentalists, Westerners, Indian tribes and many other interests. But the atmosphere grew particularly fraught during President Obama’s tenure. Two statistics tell the story: For five years, from March 2009 to March 2014, Congress did not add a single new wilderness area. And that stretch included the entire 112th Congress of 2011-2012, marking the first time a Congress had not created a wilderness area since passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964.

A convergence of pent-up demand, urgent deadlines and personnel shuffles on Capitol Hill created a window for discussions in 2014. But this was never going to be a simple process of putting a couple of lawmakers in a room and directing them to hash it out. Hundreds of bills had piled up during the five years of inaction. Scores of senators and representatives wanted them passed, or in some cases blocked, in states and districts all over the country.

The challenges ranged from choosing what to include, to Republican anger that had festered over the five-year period, to a Congress divided between GOP and Democratic control. The division meant that GOP and Democratic demands were pitted against each other and that all “four corners” of the Hill—House Republicans, House Democrats, Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans—needed to be part of the process. Months of talks commenced among a circle of aides who knew their bosses and their subject matter well, and who patiently jiggered and rejiggered dozens of moving parts.

“It was one of the smaller packages I ever worked on, and by far the most difficult,” said a Democratic aide involved in the horse-trading.

In the end, 169 pages of energy and public-lands provisions were tucked into a must-pass defense bill as 2014 drew to a close. It was like Christmas morning for conservationists and developers alike—except that in many cases they had to accept lumps of coal along with their gifts.

The package created nearly 250,000 acres of wilderness in Colorado, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and Washington state, and protected about 140 miles of rivers. It added or expanded more than a dozen national parks and put mineral development off limits on hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land. But it also streamlined permits for grazing and oil and gas drilling on federal land and opened 110,000 acres of federal land for economic and commercial use—including logging in part of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest and mining in Arizona, Montana and Nevada.

This was not one of those heralded mega-deals announced by proud lawmakers at a triumphant press conference. It was a collection of mini-deals affecting people and places in 36 states in myriad different ways.

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