Font ResizeYou can expect some more fun and games next legislative session from the right-wing federal-government haters who will waste valuable floor time for floor debate and committee hearings with message bills that would probably be ruled unconstitutional even if they passed.
Rep. Mike Noel, the leading, "they're coming to take me away" shouter against federal government "intrusion" who has not been afraid to spend our tax money to file unsuccessful lawsuits against federal enforcement of federal laws on federal land, is at it again.
The Kanab Republican said on KCPW-FM earlier this month that he will sponsor a bill next year that would bar federal Bureau of Land Management rangers from enforcing laws on Utah's public lands. He said the federal rangers do not have the authority under the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act and enforcement should be in the hands of county sheriffs instead.
Actually, the enforcement provision of the FLPMA gives the Interior secretary leeway to contract with local law enforcement to uphold the laws on public land, but that is up to the federal official, not the state. That provision also states: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed as reducing or limiting the enforcement authority vested in the Secretary by any other statute."
There also is that little matter of the supremacy clause in Article Six of the U.S. Constitution, which clearly states that the laws of the federal government trump any contrary
Therefore, Noel's idea would hold up in the federal courts about as well as did the old Jim Crow laws of the South after the enactment of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But that won't stop Noel and his supporters in the right-wing caverns of the Utah Republican Party, who wield some pretty heavy clout among the delegates in county and state conventions. These are usually the same folks who holler about activist judges who are acting contrary to the "original intent" of the authors of the Constitution. In other words, the Founding Fathers' words should be strictly interpreted -- except when the words say something these people don't like, such as the supremacy clause.
Noel's proposal was motivated in part by the federal raid in southern Utah that resulted in the arrests and indictments of about two dozen area residents for alleged looting of protected artifacts on federal land. Noel says the feds were unnecessarily rough and the locally elected law enforcement officials would handle such enforcement in a more even-handed and humane way.
That would mean San Juan County Sheriff Mike Lacy, whose brother David was one of those arrested. That should lead to some interesting dinner table conversations at Sunday get-togethers.
But that also would mean entrusting the enforcement of federal laws designed to protect all of us to the cops in, say, La Verkin, whose City Council once passed an ordinance banning the United Nations from entering its borders, or to the cops of Virgin, which once passed an ordinance requiring everyone in the town to have a gun, or to the cops of Kanab, in Noel's Kane County, which passed a resolution defining what a family should be and basically letting anyone who doesn't fit that definition know they are not welcome there.
Those are sure the guys I want protecting my federal rights.
I remember the sight of Florida's Lee County Sheriff Mike Scott, in uniform at a Sarah Palin rally last year, talking about "real Americans." He then sneered while referring to "Barack Hussein Obama" and saluted the whooping yahoos pleased with this partisan insult. Without federal protections, how would you like to get pulled over on a back-country road by that guy with a New York license plate on your car?
If Noel's vision ever comes to pass and you happen to be a tourist in southern Utah, if you come upon a weird-looking guy sitting on a bridge and holding a banjo, turn around and run like hell.
