Visiting House Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-AR) at his Capitol Hill office during President Trump’s D.C. trip proved eventful.
Anytime I interview conservative conservationists, wild things happen. I saw a black bear with Congressman and former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, I also spoke to Senator Steve Daines in Grizzly Country. So it was no surprise to see Westerman channel his inner waterfowler.
Pre-interview, he picked up a gavel that doubled as a duck call and demonstrated his calling prowess to me and his staff. Let’s say he could rival some champion duck callers.
Naturally, the lone registered forester in Congress is animated about conservation policy. His committee goes on both offense proposing smart bills and on defense responding to onerous Biden administration rulemaking, respectively.
“Some call it oversight; it seems more like whack-a-mole,” he told me.
He quipped, “I sometimes wonder if they've got a committee over there that sits around thinking up things to get us worked up because they're doing a pretty good job of it. They give us a lot of opportunities to have oversight to push back on regulations that we can't see any logic behind them, or what the benefit of it is.”
When not sparring with the White House, the committee has scored notable victories. Recently, it helped to defeat a proposed–then pulled–Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule to list natural asset companies on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Good bipartisan bills like American Wildlife Habitat Conservation Act were introduced and the EXPLORE Act passed the House, respectively. Recently, Westerman and Congressman Scott Peters, a California Democrat, introduced historic forest management legislation.
Westerman mentions the U.S. Fish and Wildlife (USFWS) BIDEH rewrite, which I’ve extensively covered here at Townhall. The proposed rule would put fighting climate change ahead of wildlife management and agricultural practices to the detriment of true conservation practices.
“It's beyond comprehension that Fish and Wildlife would come out and say, ‘We're not going to allow agricultural practices on Fish and Wildlife refuges anymore’,” Westerman said.
He noted that farmers and ranchers play a pivotal role in creating wildlife habitat - especially for waterfowl - on or near wildlife refuges in his district.
“I call it the Field of Dreams concept: If you build it, they will come. You create habitat, wildlife will find it,” he continued.
Westerman also criticized FWS policy to ban lead tackle and ammunition on national wildlife refuges lands. The first iteration of this policy was enacted last year and prohibits lead usage on eight wildlife refuges.
The chairman said these rules have “no scientific data backing,” and he's correct. As I noted in RealClear Policy, a 2008 Centers for Disease Control study assessed blood lead levels of participants who consumed and didn’t consume game meat and found “control group participants who ate wild game “had 0.30 µg/dl higher PbB in comparison with those who did not consume wild game.” If math isn’t your strong suit, the difference here is statistically insignificant. A similar Health and Human Services (HHS) study determined lead poisoning doesn’t result “from ingestion of lead bullet fragments in large game animals.” Unsurprisingly, the Biden administration leans on faulty science to regulate conservation and incrementally ban hunting and fishing on public lands.
Westerman also conveyed his frustration with Commerce Department rulemaking to reduce Atlantic Ocean vessel speed limits to 11.5 miles per hour for six months under the guise of “protecting” endangered North Atlantic right whales.
“They're trying to impose this 10 mile an hour speed limit on fishing vessels, which is going to do great damage to recreational boating and recreational fishing,” he added. “It's like they're cherry picking data and making up their own rules. And the other part is just brazen. It's like they don't care.”
The sportsman further lamented the current state of federal conservation policy that has yielded to special interest groups that “have undue access to this administration in the White House and the agency's overly influenced policy.”
I proceeded to ask him about the brewing environmental crisis at the border due to open border policies.
“40% of the entire southern border is on federal lands,” he explained. “The best estimate I've seen is that every migrant that comes across leaves an average of eight to nine pounds of trash. So multiply that times 10 million, and you're talking about a lot of trash.”
He added, “It's mind blowing to me that I can go to the border, and you can see where trees have been cut off of federal land to build campfires and to cook with … But you let an American citizen go out on federal land and cut a tree down and build a campfire and see what happens to them. This is much bigger– much bigger–than federal lands. The amount of illegal drugs that are coming across the border on federal lands…”
One law Westerman hopes to reform is the Antiquities Act- a frequently misused law that recently turned 118.
“The Antiquities Act has been abused for a long time by Democrats and Republicans. But especially by Obama–I think [he] greatly abused the Antiquities Act. And I think Biden's greatly abusing the Antiquities Act.”
The problem with old laws like this, he argued, is they’ve never been properly re-authorized.
“If they're not authorized, they’re not supposed to be funded. But because we've had so much dysfunction on funding and we do these omnibus bills, you see these programs get reauthorized through the appropriations process. And we're really pushing back on that and trying to make Congress operate the way it was designed to operate, where the authorizing committees authorized that program and then the Appropriations Committee appropriates to that authorization.”