By Rick Manning

Adapted from testimony given before the House Western Caucus.

The Endangered Species Act has been stretched beyond recognition into little more than a property grab while little progress is made on species restoration.

I personally have been following the need to reform the Endangered Species Act for more than twenty years and unfortunately, many of the concerns heard back before the turn of the century have become a reality today.

I want to make one quick point on the on-going disaster that is the Northern Spotted Owl failed recovery plan, and then close my remarks with what I find to be one of the most incredible attempts to create legal liability in the United States that I have ever witnessed.

The Northern Spotted Owl has been on the threatened list for almost thirty years now, and the barred owl continues to invade its habitat posing the greatest threat to the bird’s survival. 

Yet, the anti-timber harvesting environmental left continue to demand that massive acreage, including private land, be added to the current sizeable amount of land dedicated to the Northern Spotted Owl’s recovery in spite of the proven failure of this habitat based plan. 

Let’s be clear.  The management plan for recovering the Northern Spotted Owl is not working.  Fewer Northern Spotted Owls exist in the new habitat created for them than before.

Let’s also be clear.  The Northern Spotted Owl forest management plan is essentially a non-management plan, and it is doing grievous harm to all wildlife that depends upon the forest as well as the forested areas themselves.

Last year’s catastrophic fires in northern California and southern Oregon were the most predictable disasters in history.  In fact, Steve Brink, the Vice President of Public Resources for the California Forestry Association ominously predicted these exact types of expanded, uncontrollable fires in testimony before the House Resources Committee in 2013 when he said: “The result of increasing tree density is an increasing trend in the number, size, and intensity of wildfires on California’s National Forests. The continuation of only accomplishing removal of 7 percent of annual growth will mean we will continue to see the increasing trends continue. Wildfire behavior today is like nothing that has ever been experienced in California before.”

Brink went on to warn, “every time there is a species-specific habitat designation put in-place, the tendency is to stop forest health and fuels reduction projects. In the case of the Spotted Owl, the reduction in activity is to promote increased canopy cover and other characteristics for species, which then leads to an ever-increasing tree density on California’s National Forests. The result is increases in number, size, and intensity of wildfires that destroy the forest, the integrity of the watershed, and the wildlife habitat that is trying to be promoted. Today (remember this testimony was given in six years ago), one-third of all wildfire burned acres on California National Forests are high intensity stand-replacing fire; and the trend continues to increase.”

Bottom line, if you want hotter, more intense wildfires, do exactly what the Northern Spotted Owl management plan demands.  To the environmentalists — the disastrous 2018 Mendocino, Camp and Carr fires which ravaged northern California last year, killing tens of thousands of wild animals, destroying more than half a million acres while killing almost 100 people weren’t the results of global warming, climate change or anything else you want to call it, they were the direct result of your failed prohibitions on proper forest management. 

All this damage and in terms of the Northern Spotted Owl, the plan has failed.  It is time to return to sound forest management along with creating a wildlife management plan to aggressively reduce the numbers of the barred owls in these western forests. 

I’d like to turn briefly to a just filed lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service from the Center for Biodiversity demanding that the Emperor Penguin be listed as an endangered species under the law.  While popularized in culture by Hollywood, no penguin is naturally found in the entire northern hemisphere, and the legal push by the left on this issue is clearly nothing but an attempt to create U.S. liability for what happens on the expanding Antarctic ice cap.

Congress should dictate that no species shall be listed which is not indigenous to the United States.  While this seems simple and obvious, given the current state of the Courts, it would be unwise to leave this point up to a random federal judge with their nationwide injunctive powers.

Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.

 

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ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured column from TheHill.com, John Solomon reminds readers that Democrats were already threatening aid to Ukraine over potential investigations of former Vice President Joe Biden:

Democrats were first to enlist Ukraine in U.S. elections

By John Solomon

Earlier this month, during a bipartisan meeting in Kiev, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) delivered a pointed message to Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

While choosing his words carefully, Murphy made clear – by his own account – that Ukraine currently enjoyed bipartisan support for its U.S. aid but that could be jeopardized if the new president acquiesced to requests by President Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate past corruption allegations involving Americans, including former Vice President Joe Biden’s family.

Murphy boasted after the meeting that he told the new Ukrainian leader that U.S. aid was his country’s “most important asset” and it would be viewed as election-meddling and “disastrous for long-term U.S.-Ukraine relations” to bend to the wishes of Trump and Giuliani.

"I told Zelensky that he should not insert himself or his government into American politics. I cautioned him that complying with the demands of the President's campaign representatives to investigate a political rival of the President would gravely damage the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. There are few things that Republicans and Democrats agree on in Washington these days, and support for Ukraine is one of them," Murphy told me today, confirming what he told Ukraine's leader.

The implied message did not require an interpreter for Zelensky to understand: Investigate the Ukraine dealings of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, and you jeopardize Democrats' support for future U.S. aid to Kiev.

The Murphy anecdote is a powerful reminder that, since at least 2016, Democrats repeatedly have exerted pressure on Ukraine, a key U.S. ally for buffering Russia, to meddle in U.S. politics and elections.

And that activity long proceeded Giuliani’s discussions with Ukrainian officials and Trump’s phone call to Zelensky in July, seeking to have Ukraine formally investigate whether then-Vice President Joe Biden used a threat of canceling foreign aid to shut down an investigation into $3 million routed to the U.S. firm run by Biden’s son.

As I have reported, the pressure began at least as early as January 2016, when the Obama White House unexpectedly invited Ukraine’s top prosecutors to Washington to discuss fighting corruption in the country.

The meeting, promised as training, turned out to be more of a pretext for the Obama administration to pressure Ukraine’s prosecutors to drop an investigation into the Burisma Holdings gas company that employed Hunter Biden and to look for new evidence in a then-dormant criminal case against eventual Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, a GOP lobbyist.

U.S. officials “kept talking about how important it was that all of our anti-corruption efforts be united,” said Andrii Telizhenko, the former political officer in the Ukrainian embassy in Washington who organized and attended the meetings. 

Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine’s chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me that, soon after he returned from the Washington meeting, he saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election. That's when two top Ukrainian officials released secret evidence to the American media, smearing Manafort. 

The release of the evidence forced Manafort to step down as Trump’s top campaign adviser. A Ukrainian court concluded last December that the release of the evidence amounted to an unlawful intervention in the U.S. election by Kiev’s government, although that ruling has since been overturned on a technicality.

Shortly after the Ukrainian prosecutors returned from their Washington meeting, a new round of Democratic pressure was exerted on Ukraine — this time via its embassy in Washington.

Valeriy Chaly, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States at the time, confirmed to me in a statement issued by his office that, in March 2016, a contractor for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) pressed his embassy to try to find any Russian dirt on Trump and Manafort that might reside in Ukraine’s intelligence files.

The DNC contractor also asked Chaly's team to try to persuade Ukraine’s president at the time, Petro Poroshenko, to make a statement disparaging Manafort when the Ukrainian leader visited the United States during the 2016 election.  

Chaly said his embassy rebuffed both requests because it recognized they were improper efforts to get a foreign government to try to influence the election against Trump and for Hillary Clinton.

The political pressure continued. Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in crucial U.S. aid to Kiev if Poroshenko did not fire the country’s chief prosecutor. Ukraine would have been bankrupted without the aid, so Poroshenko obliged on March 29, 2016 and fired Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

At the time, Biden was aware that Shokin’s office was investigating Burisma, the firm employing Hunter Biden, after a December 2015 New York Times article.

What wasn’t known at the time, Shokin told me recently, was that Ukrainian prosecutors were preparing a request to interview Hunter Biden about his activities and the monies he was receiving from Ukraine. If such an interview became public during the middle of the 2016 election, it could have had enormous negative implications for Democrats.

Democrats continued to tap Ukraine for Trump dirt throughout the 2016 election, my reporting shows.

Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior U.S. Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, worked in 2016 as a contractor for Fusion GPS, the same Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research firm that hired Christopher Steele, the British spy who wrote the now-debunked dossier linking Trump to Russia collusion.

Nellie Ohr testified to Congress that some of the dirt she found on Trump during her 2016 election opposition research came from a Ukrainian parliament member. She also said that she eventually took the information to the FBI through her husband — another way Ukraine got inserted into the 2016 election.

Politics. Pressure. Opposition research. All were part of the Democrats’ playbook on Ukraine long before Trump ever called Zelensky this summer. And as Sen. Murphy’s foray earlier this month shows, it hasn’t stopped.

The evidence is so expansive as to strain the credulity of the Democrats’ current outrage at Trump’s behavior with Ukraine.

Which raises a question: Could it be the Ukraine tale currently being weaved by Democrats and their allies in the media is nothing more than a smoke screen designed to distract us from the forthcoming Justice Department inspector general report into abuses during the Democratic-inspired Russia collusion probe?

It’s a question worth asking.

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