| So Matt Koehler recently panned Jon Tester for not sharing a recent draft of the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act with the public, which augured a lot of newsink spilled over the issue. Here, then, are the winners and losers in the controversy surrounding the unreleased recent draft of Tester's Forest bill:
Winner: John Adams. In tracking down the draft bill, Adams wrote an extremely fair post about transparency, Jon Tester, and the legislative process in the US Senate.
Did Jon's staff egregiously mislead Adams' about the existence of a draft bill? Yes. Did members of the collaborative group working on the bill see the draft? Yes. Did Jon Tester promise more transparency than we've received? Yes. But do US Senate committees typically share draft legislation with the public? No. And is the bill's semi-transparent collaborative legislative-writing process typical for Washington DC? No.
What we've got is a quasi-public process that's more open than the inside-the-Beltway gang is used to, and much less open than Montanans want. Is it Tester's fault? No. It wasn't his draft, and the other members of the committee didn't make the transparency pledges that Tester did. (Tester promised to make his changes public.) If there's fault to be put on Tester, it's that his rhetoric didn't match reality. An up-front explanation and tempering of expectations at the beginning of the process would have served him well.
Loser: Jon Tester. Not for falling short of his rhetoric, but for opposing the removal of mandated logging language from the draft:
A "discussion draft" of Tester's S. 1470 legislation started circulating last week among critics of the bill. This version did not have the requirement to log at least 10,000 acres a year in the Beaverhead-Deerlodge and Kootenai national forests, or the one-year limitation on U.S. Forest Service environmental reviews. It also deleted language from the wilderness sections that would have allowed military helicopter training and off-road vehicle use for livestock herding.
For his part, Tester said this week that he would not accept removing the logging mandate.
"There are a number of changes folks would like to see made to S. 1470," Tester said. "Some will be implemented, all will be considered. Make no mistake, if the timber mandates are not part of the deal, I'll pull the plug on the whole thing."
The mandate makes no sense. Sure, I get why they put it in - it's probably an end run around lawsuits against logging ventures on public lands. But...a mandate doesn't change the legal conditions around the lawsuits, and doesn't account for dropping timber prices - if the bottom falls out of the timber market...and no one wants to cut...then what?
I'm no free-market maven, but it seems...irrational...to force supply on a market without any demand.
If the timber industry wants to log public lands, they should probably work together with environmental groups to make sure they're following the law and pay attention to environmental concerns. Shoving timber on the market seems a pretty poor "compromise."
Winner: The public. Tester's forest bill has been more transparent than most, and the controversies around the draft only make the issue keener and puts more pressure on Tester to follow through on his promises of openness. Hopefully, it'll put some pressure on the Senate to make its committee-work more open. But don't hold your breath.
Losers: Conservatives. Until Dennis Rehberg starts releasing drafts of bills discussed in the House Appropriations committee, I think we can all agree that conservatives' criticism of Tester's efforts to make his committee-work open and transparent is clearly hypocritical. |
