Here is the full editorial followed by a link to the actual
editorial on the NY Times site. It speaks for it self.
Published: October 30, 2005
Richard Pombo has had a hard time keeping himself out of the news
lately. In late September, a watchdog group called Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named Mr. Pombo, a seven-
term House member from California, one of the 13 most corrupt
politicians in Congress. Three weeks later the Center for Public
Integrity accused him of taking junkets paid for by the
International Foundation for the Conservation of Natural Resources -
the kind of organization, heavy with corporate donors, in which the
word "conservation" is a wink to the wise. And last week the League
of Conservation Voters accused him of selling out to a long list of
corporate interests.
But what has really put Mr. Pombo on everyone's radar is the steady
stream of environmentally destructive legislation flowing from the
House Resources Committee, which he runs. The legislation would
undermine environmental safeguards and raise broad new threats to
endangered species and public lands.
Mr. Pombo, of course, makes no apologies. First elected in 1992 - he
was a first-term city councilman in Tracy, Calif., at the time - he
is philosophically an outspoken product of the extreme property
rights movement. He once liked to claim, falsely as it turned out,
that his rights had been trampled by environmentalists and by the
provisions of the Endangered Species Act.
He came to Congress as a result of redistricting. With luck he will
leave the same way. The 11th District, once largely agricultural,
has been overwhelmed by development; and while the East Bay and
Central Valley are still nominally Republican, it is far from
certain that they will continue to support a man of Mr. Pombo's
radical turn of mind.
In 2003, thanks to the support of the hard-nosed Republican leader
Tom DeLay, he became, at age 42, the Resources Committee chairman
and thus the bottleneck through which most legislation involving
energy and the environment must pass. Mr. Pombo has more than lived
up to Mr. DeLay's expectations, pure in ideology, tough in
legislative combat.
In September, he engineered floor approval of a bill that would
completely undermine the Endangered Species Act, which is something
he has wanted to do since arriving in Washington. And last week, in
a tour de force, he engineered committee approval of a budget bill
that is ostensibly meant to raise federal revenues but in fact
represents a major assault on the public lands.
In its original form Mr. Pombo's bill called for the sale of 15
national parks. He withdrew that idea - a stunt, he says - as well
as the notion of selling mineral rights within the parks. He now
proposes allowing mining companies to buy lands on which they have
staked claims. This practice, known as "patenting," was banned in
1995, and under present rules companies can only lease federal land.
Mr. Pombo says his proposal will help the federal budget because
companies will have to pay $1,000 an acre to buy the land. But the
provision is so vaguely drawn - companies, for instance, will not
have to show that the land contains valuable minerals - that it
could potentially expose hundreds of millions of acres, including
the national forests, to development. This has nothing to do with
mining, and everything to do with stealing land that is owned by the
American public.
Mr. Pombo's bill would also authorize drilling in coastal areas that
have been off limits for decades and sell leases in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. But asking the oil companies themselves
for money is, of course, unthinkable - Mr. Pombo would freeze the
fees these companies pay to operate on public land, even as they
report huge profits.
This is, in short, a sleazy piece of work, written by a man who
appears to be able to conceive of property rights as something that
only a private individual or a corporation can have; a man who
betrays no awareness that the American public has a shared right in
the refuge and the national parks and the millions of acres he wants
to sell to developers.
Mr. Pombo's only idea, and it is a terrible one, is to treat this
nation the way he treats his Congressional district, as if it were
ripe for exploitation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/30/opinion/30sun1.html
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