Montana Republicans Vow to Kill Sen. Mike Lee’s Public Land Sales Provision

The sale of federal public lands will not make it through the Senate reconciliation process, Sen. Steve Daines told NOTUS on Thursday evening.

The Montana Republican said that he has enough votes to kill the public lands sale provision with an amendment, if the recently pared-down proposal from Utah Sen. Mike Lee to sell 1.2 million acres of federal land for housing makes it through the approvals process from the Senate parliamentarian.

Lee’s original proposal — to sell at least 2.2 million acres of federal public land — split the usually united front Western-state Republicans take on land issues, and sparked an immediate firestorm of consternation from left- and right-wing conservation, recreation and environmental groups alike.

Lee said that the proposal was intended to address the affordable housing problem many cities in Western states are battling, while his opponents described the effort as just the latest in the series of attempts by Lee to shrink overall federal land ownership.

The federal government owns more than half of the land in Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska — a fact that has long frustrated Utah’s state political leaders, who in recent years went so far as to sue to try to force land transfers to the state. Even though Lee carved out an exception for Montana from any public land sales in his initial plan, the Montana delegation in both the House and Senate remained staunch in their opposition.

Then, earlier this week, the parliamentarian — the unelected official who judges whether a provision can be included in the reconciliation process — threw out Lee’s first plan. (In addition to the public lands sale, the parliamentarian has tossed many GOP priorities in recent days, including the Senate’s plans for major changes to Medicaid.)

Lee then immediately submitted a revised proposal for consideration Tuesday, offering a smaller total amount of land sales with greater restrictions, limited only to Bureau of Land Management lands and only to a 5 mile distance from population centers.

“I’ve listened and made substantial changes to the lands proposal to accommodate their concerns,” Lee wrote in response to the loud protests raised by groups like Hunter Nation, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership.

That revision has not appeased Daines and Tim Sheehy, the junior Montana Senator, both of whom are strong advocates for public lands.

“We’re already prepared, and we’ve got the votes to strike it if we need to,” Daines said when asked if he would offer an amendment to cancel the provision. “I think it’s going to fail at the [parliamentarian] level. We’ll see,” he added. Idaho Sens. Mike Crapo and James Risch issued statements last week declaring their skepticism as well. Risch said to NOTUS that he had spoken with Lee but wouldn’t share the contents of that conversation.

In the House, Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke pledged to vote against the bill if it came with the public land sales attached.

Lee told reporters Wednesday that the new proposal was currently under review from the parliamentarian. No announcement had been made as of Thursday evening about whether the parliamentarian had made a decision.

“This bypasses the existing laws on the books that allow for public land sales when necessary and when they make sense,” said Kaden McArthur, the policy director at Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, when explaining why he was organizing an opposition campaign. “We’re not opposed to all public land sales, where transfers and sales to state and local communities can make sense. But there are laws on the books that already allow for this.”

“The scale and scope of the proposal under consideration in the senate right now really reduces anyone’s ability to come to the table and think about all of the factors that make housing and affordable housing challenging, primarily in rural communities in the west, and come up with some solutions,” said Madeleine West, the vice president for western conservation at TRCP.

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Anna Kramer is a reporter at NOTUS.