The New York Times - Puffy, Feathered Sticking Point of a $612 Billion House Bill

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By Jennifer Steinhauer

Representative Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican, spoke for many Americans this week when he conceded during a House hearing that he had never laid eyes on a sage grouse. Had he seen one, he surmised, he would have thought "a bobwhite quail got friendly with a Dominecker hen."

But a Republican maneuver on the $612 billion military bill to block the Interior Department from adding the bird to the endangered species list has set off a major congressional skirmish that has spilled over into Western states, where the sage grouse is revered, and among environmental groups that fear a steady erosion of the Endangered Species Act.

The attempt to circumvent protections for the sage grouse -- fluffy, with a formidable chest once puffed, chickenlike yet more proud -- as well those for the lesser prairie chicken and the American burying beetle is part of an ambitious push that House Republicans have pursued since retaking the majority in 2010 to roll back, limit or unravel environmental regulations.

They have put scores of major regulations concerning water, air, dietary guidelines, coal mines, light bulbs and assorted creatures in their legislative cross hairs as part of their broader policy agenda, largely through amendments to large-scale spending bills.

"Cutting the administration's unnecessary red tape that hurts businesses and our economy has been, and will continue to be, a priority of the Appropriations Committee," said Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for the panel.

The measures mostly died in the Senate when Democrats were in the majority and refused to take them up. With Republicans now in control of the Senate, the agendas of the two chambers will be more aligned.

Environmental protection has historically been a bipartisan issue. President Theodore Roosevelt oversaw the expansion of the national park system, and President Richard M. Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and created the Environmental Protection Agency.

But in recent years, citing overregulation as a threat to the economy, Republicans have taken on these rules more frequently. Since the 1990s, they have made several efforts to rewrite the Endangered Species Act to limit its application or render it toothless, mindful of their earlier struggles against protectors of snail darters and spotted owls.

But the vociferousness and scale is far beyond previous years, said David Goldston, the government affairs director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, who was chief of staff for Republicans on the House Committee on Science from 2001 through 2006.

Few of these fights have inspired as much emotional response as the one over whether to list the sage grouse, whose numbers have fallen into the thousands, as an endangered species.

"There's a remarkable amount of national focus on the sage grouse," said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, which is funded in part by contributions from the oil and gas industry.

"The impacts of this listing would be broader, geographically, than any other endangered species that the government has ever listed. It covers 150 million acres of land, which is a lot of land, the whole western United States. It's 11 states. A third of the country would be affected."

House Republicans, in advance of a legal deadline for final determination of the sage grouse status, have gone at it in several forms, most recently in the military bill. There they argued that giving the bird special status would put military training operations in peril because the birds' habitat -- which stretches across an array of Western training areas -- would be essentially off limits.

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