Bureau of Land Management Acting Director William Pendley

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, I appreciate very much my colleague from Nevada.

Let me start by welcoming the Presiding Officer back to the Senate. We are glad that you are here and that you are feeling better.

I thank my colleague from New Mexico, my neighbor, the senior Senator from New Mexico, Senator Udall, for organizing this today. This is, I know, a matter that is very close to his heart. Thanks in large part to Senator Udall's leadership and the leadership of the Senator from Arizona and others, we have worked really hard to not have public lands be a partisan issue in the Senate, and I think that reflects the way it is out West, where our public lands really are the foundation of our economy and who we are. They make us who we are. They are a cultural touchstone for all of us in the West.

Instead of comprehending this, President Trump, as he has done in so many other areas, has pursued a public lands agenda that is way outside the mainstream of conventional American thought. Few decisions better capture how extreme that position is and how frenzied his agenda is than his decision to hire William Perry Pendley to lead the Bureau of Land Management.

As we have heard today, Mr. Pendley doesn't even believe in the idea of public lands. He has argued that the Founding Fathers intended for all Federal lands to be sold. Think about what that would have meant if we had sold off the public lands of the United States.

They are the envy of the world. They are the envy of the world, and all of the work that Teddy Roosevelt and others had done to make sure that our generation would be able to benefit would have been lost if Pendley's constitutional interpretation had controlled.

Asking someone like that to manage our public lands, including 8.3 million acres in Colorado, is like asking somebody to be Secretary of Education who doesn't believe in public education. Given the track record of this administration, I guess it is not that surprising that he would put somebody in charge of public lands who believed that they are actually illegal or unconstitutional.

Mr. Pendley is by far the most extreme anti-public lands nominee in my lifetime. You have heard the Senator from New Mexico talk about his attacks on people of color. You have heard about the fact that he doesn't believe in climate change. Pendley's ideology on public lands, on climate, and on so many other issues doesn't look anything like the consensus we have worked so hard to try to establish in Colorado.

I think fundamental to this is that his extreme ideology does not perceive or conceive the economic reality in Colorado or New Mexico or Nevada or Arizona or Montana, where public lands sustain local businesses and climate change is undermining our farmers and ranchers.

Since the BLM moved to Colorado, sort of, we have had a front row seat to this extremist agenda. This spring, Pendley signed off on a resource management plan that opened up the North Fork Valley of the Gunnison--one of our most beautiful agricultural valleys in Colorado-- to more oil and gas development.

Local leaders worried that his plan failed to protect the region's watershed and will threaten the area's agricultural and outdoor economy. Instead of listening to Colorado, Mr. Pendley signed off on a plan, as he so often does, written in Washington by a bunch of special interests here who want to plunder our land out there.

As Senators, we have a constitutional responsibility to ensure that the people entrusted with leading our Federal agencies are, at a minimum, qualified for the positions they hold and I would hope are within the mainstream of conventional American political ideology, but we have not been allowed to do that in this case.

Mr. Pendley was nominated by the President to lead the BLM. The response was so negative that I have to imagine there were Senators on the other side of the aisle who said: Senator McConnell, please don't make us take this vote. Please. I have a tough election coming up.

Don't make me take this vote, Mr. President. I am scared to take this vote.

As a result, they withdrew his nomination because it couldn't pass the Senate. That is how the system is supposed to work. You can always put it on the floor and see whether we will support it. In this case, the response was so negative, they withdrew the nomination. That happens regularly. What is incredibly unusual in this case is they left him in his job. Having demonstrated that there was no public support in the Senate--the Senate unwilling to take a vote for fear of how unpopular it would be in the Western United States--they said: Well, you can be the Acting BLM Director.

That is a disgrace. I don't know how anybody in this Chamber could call themselves committed to the U.S. Constitution if a President can nominate somebody, see the votes aren't there, withdraw it, and make them the Acting Director of the agency. That is the work of a dictator, not the President of the United States.

Every now and then, you would expect the leader of this body to stand up for the prerogatives of this body, to stand up for the separation of powers and for the rule of law--particularly if you call yourself a constitutional conservative.

We have a choice to make: to do nothing or to do our jobs. The American people want us to do our jobs. They are sick of the dysfunction here.

From the perspective of Colorado, the decision on Mr. Pendley is simple: Someone who spent his entire career opposed to the very idea of public lands is unfit to lead a land management agency, period.

He should do the right thing if the President won't: Step down immediately and allow somebody to take on the responsibility who actually understands how important it is to preserve the legacy our parents and grandparents created for us so we can preserve it for the next generation of Americans and the generation after that.

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, if I could just ask--

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Mr. BENNET. The Senator from New Mexico was so kind to refer to the CORE Act, the Colorado Outdoor Recreation Economy Act. Just a reminder: At the heart of that bill, which is 400,000 acres of public lands in Colorado--70,000 of which is wilderness area to protect our critical watershed--is the Camp Hale National Historic Landscape, which is the first such national historic landscape designation in the history of the United States. It memorializes the incredible work of our veterans who came to Camp Hale to train, to fight in the mountains of Northern Italy, pushed the Nazis out of Northern Italy. And that wasn't even enough for them. Then they came back, and they started our entire outdoor recreation industry, our ski resort. It was the same generation of people. That is an exact, perfect example--I am so glad Senator Udall brought it up--a perfect example of why we need to treasure our public lands.

With that, I will yield the floor and turn it back over to Senator Udall.

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