Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair
Everyone has heard the old saying about “the fox guarding the hen house” — which generally means you wind up with a fat fox and dead chickens. That’s something Montana’s senators should keep in mind when the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee weighs Donald Trump’s nomination of former oil, gas and mining lobbyist David Bernhardt to be the next Secretary of the Interior following the December resignation of ethics-plagued Ryan Zinke. And yes, that means Republican Sen. Steve Daines is going to have to decide if putting Trump’s raper-scraper in charge of 245 million acres of America’s public lands and their wildlife is in the best interests of his Montana constituents and future generations.
There’s no question that Bernhardt is very, very familiar with the structure and duties of the Department of the Interior. After all, the function of a lobbyist is to understand the law, rules, regulations and mission of the federal agencies with which they interact. And when it comes to industry lobbyists, make no mistake, their primary interest is to serve the interests of their clients.
Unfortunately for the rest of the populace, these highly skilled and very well-funded operatives generally have myopic vision when it comes to the ancillary consequences of their actions. In that regard, Bernhardt has already shown his true colors — and no surprise, they’re the color of money in the form of profits for extractive…