Call it a Saturday night special.
Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee released a statement yesterday saying that he would no longer pursue a provision that would allow for public land sales in the GOP tax bill that’s moving through Congress.
The move came as the vote counts became less predictable and the July 4 deadline to pass the tax measure looms. Senate Republicans from Montana and Idaho were going to be hard NOs on the whole measure, jeopardizing tax breaks for a bevy of special interests. And other cloakroom counting signaled that there might be more. Lee could only lose three votes. In the end, the risks of tanking a Trump Administration priority were too great.
After Lee removed the provision, the legislation cleared a key procedural hurdle on Saturday.
On the Senate side, the land-sale interest coveted by a select few in Utah was not special enough. A month ago the House rejected public land sale language championed by Utah Rep. Celeste Maloy and Nevada Rep. Mark Amodei, both Republicans. And it still had problems with Rep. Ryan Zinke and other Republicans in the House — where the bill will return if it passes the Senate for a conference committee before going to President Trump’s desk.
Lee’s provision at face value was about selling off public lands to generate revenues for the U.S. government while simultaneously providing new real estate for residential home developers. But the unprecedented move put us at the precipice of a greater shift in land management unlike any other. It was a means of forcing us to accept that our public wealth can be bartering chips for politics.
In Lee’s statement announcing his decision, he alluded to the provisions not being able to pass muster from the Senate parliamentarian. That technocratic, impartial job in the Senate exists as the overseer of rules. In this case, that job requires guiding the budget reconciliation process, a procedural means of expediting spending hikes and budget slashes with a majority vote rather than a two-thirds hurdle. The Democrats used this procedural means to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022.
In defeat, Lee alluded that the Parliamentarian raised the question as to whether the lands would be sold to families rather than shadowy, faceless corporate interests.
Specifically, Lee called out foreign investment like China and firms like Black Rock as potential beneficiaries of the housing provisions wrapped up in the public land sales.
While this provision is now dead, there are other public land sale provisions to consider down the road. Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto has a bill to sell public lands in Nevada. It also has some nominal language about housing. It doesn’t, however, have language about preventing Black Rock or foreign investors from buying homes built on once-public lands.
As GBWN has elaborated for years, Las Vegas has a special provision allowing public land sales that came into law more than a quarter century ago. And, over time, we can infer from looking at maps of those now-developed lands surrounding Sin City that once-public parcels are now controlled by Wall Street interests, not families. Cortez Masto’s Southern Nevada Economic Development Act expands that longstanding policy.
We will see what happens in the future. But Lee highlighted a major policy issue for the pro-land-sale crowd. Let’s keep the discussion going. And, of course, let’s keep asking where the water will come from to serve development in the arid west.
Lee’s proposal symbolizes a misguided logical appeal that developing in the desert or in forests will solve the housing crisis. However, there is an affordability crisis that building in the wildland-urban exurbs will not fix. We need a congress that is more interested in fixing that problem than bolstering the balance sheets of billionaires with tax bills built on arcane parliamentary rules.
Maybe one day that will come. Neither party is ready.
Lastly, not to be forgotten in this is all of you. There was a unified outcry unlike any other we have seen in natural resource policy debates. Lee’s Instagram page is a good barometer of how people felt. Usually he has a few hundred comments on a given issue. On this matter, he has thousands. To put it nicely, few cast praise on his proposal.
At a time where apathy casts a pall over many, know your voice still counts in this experiment that we know to be a constitutional federal republic called the United States.
Lee’s statement admits as much. He heard from you. So did others. It’s not in a bill that still includes a lot of bad things. There are giveaways to tech bros, finance bros, and oil bros that are ripe for debate.
But a win is a win. Take them when you can.
