On September 5, 1787, at the Constitutional Convention, they were discussing the public land related authorities in the Constitution, including the authority that has now been included in whats often referred to as the Enclave Clause, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17. One of the delegates to the Federal Convention of 1787, Elbridge Gerry, a delegate from Massachusetts, stood before the convention and made an astute observation. Mr. Gerry expressed concern that, “this power [that is, the power of congress over federal public lands] might be made use of to enslave any particular state by buying up its territory, and that the strongholds proposed would be a means of awing the state into undue obedience into the general government.” Then, as now, wise observations often came from the state of Massachusetts. Then, as now, we have a grave risk associated with the fact that when the federal government owns this much land, the federal government has this much power. This was on the minds of the delegates to the Convention of 1787, that one of the things they needed to protect against was the concentration of too much power in the hands of the few, especially the concentration of too much power within the federal government. They understood, and each of them had a mission to protect the sovereignty of their respective states. They understood that if Congress had too much power to simply buy up too much land in any one state, disproportionately in some states, the federal government would have too much influence within that state. Now, I would ask you, when you look at the map in this clip, does that look equitable? Does that look like an equitable distribution of federal landownership? We have to keep in mind that just as there are benefits associated with some of our public lands, there are also burdens attached to those benefits. And when you look at those burdens, its difficult to say anything other than that they are disproportionately allocated into a certain region of the United States. Theyre overwhelmingly located within the Rocky Mountains and areas west of the Rocky Mountains. And so to the extent that these benefits benefit everyone in the United States, then the burdens ought to be shared by everyone in the United States as well. And yet, they are not. PILT, again, is woefully inadequate as it is. But now, Congress is trying to withdraw funding for PILT. And even though some may say well fund it later this year, we have no guarantee of that, and we should be funding it right now. This is one of the several problems with the omnibus spending bill currently being considered by Congress.
Posted on: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 21:00:30 +0000
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