Before the 2010 mid-term elections, three affiliated Big Green groups considered their post-election strategy.
The Pew-supported Campaign for America's Wilderness and its paid public communications contractors -- The Wilderness Society and the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance -- realized things did not look good for their Democrat allies.
By Election Day, they had prepared to make the most of the debacle's fallout.
On November 10, after weeks of busy orchestration, William H. Meadows -- president of the Wilderness Society and chairman of Pew's Campaign for America's Wilderness -- led a carefully selected coalition of 172 environmental groups from 41 states in writing a letter to the U.S. House and Senate leadership asking Congress to use its Lame Duck session to pass an omnibus land law.
One of the groups signing the letter was the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance.
Two days later, New Mexico Democrat Senator Jeff Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, confirmed that he was bundling more than 60 of his committee's bills to create new national parks, monuments, wilderness areas and wildlife sanctuaries into an omnibus measure for Senate passage before the 111th Congress adjourns.
That's too many coincidences, but nobody noticed last Monday when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pledged to move a gigantic "Frankenstein" package of 100-plus land grab bills from three Senate committees -- and do it within two weeks.
It was a kind of "spit-in-your-eye" reminder to the Tea Party that Democrats will still control the Senate come January.
Democrat leaders of three committees -- Commerce, Energy and Natural Resources, and Environment and Public Works -- are scurrying to send Reid their list of bills that couldn't pass by themselves, in hopes that stuffing them all into an omnibus lands bill will turn the trick.
And a trick it is. Bill Wicker, spokesman for Bingaman, said with a straight face that the panel's bills "are not controversial," and "many were approved with no opposition."
Bingaman's "Organ Mountains -- Desert Peaks Wilderness" bill was so controversial that my recent Examiner expose of its dangers was reprinted in a New Mexico newspaper (and in dozens of blogs) and generated a storm of alarmed reader comments.
Harry Reid's own "Full Funding for the Land and Water Conservation Trust Fund" bill (S. 3663) would permanently and automatically provide $1 billion per year to buy private property and turn it into federal preserves.
That was controversial enough to jolt the property rights group, American Land Rights Association, into blasting out 6.2 million emails to stop it, executive director Chuck Cushman told me.
And that business about bills being "approved with no opposition" is just in committee, not on the Senate floor. It's not unusual for bills supported by both of a state's senators to pass unopposed in committee (the Senate's version of "professional courtesy"), only to meet a bloody demise during floor debate.
Last week all 42 Senate Republicans vowed not to allow any measures to come up until the Senate agrees to extend a set of Bush-era tax cuts, leaving little time for an omnibus lands bill.
And that's only the Senate. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., ranking minority member on the House Natural Resources Committee, said that as many as 126 bills could make the omnibus "equate to a 1,400-page behemoth of over $10 billion in authorized spending."
While dithering about whether it will pass, we really ought to ask, "Who paid for this omnibus campaign, anyway?"
The seven private Pew Trusts and their public charity, $4.6 billion assets. The Wilderness Society, $55.4 million assets. Campaign for America's Wilderness, $4.2 million assets. New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, $1.1 million revenue.
It's almost like asking, "Who owns the Democrats?"
Examiner contributor Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
