What Democrats Plan to Do About Zinke
Odds are pretty good that the GOP is about to be voted out of control in the House of Representatives. And that means Representative Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, will likely succeed Republican Rob Bishop as the chairperson of the House Natural Resources Committee.
“Natural Resources has done no oversight these last two years,” Grijalva told me over the phone Tuesday afternoon. “We have not held the agencies in our jurisdiction accountable for anything. Particularly Interior.”
As chairperson of the committee, Grijalva will gain oversight of the Department of the Interior—which manages our public lands—and its Secretary, Ryan Zinke. “The change will be immediately noticeable,” he says. “We will conduct oversight and we will hold Interior accountable.”
What’s that going to look like? “There are the ethical lapses, the 14 investigations going on [into Zinke], this whole shifty behavior with trying to replace the inspector general, the travel expenses, the role of his spouse, the money that has been outlaid for security, plus everything we know about the Montana land deal, etcetera,” Grijalva says. “But the real issue is that we’ve asked many, many, many times for the information that informed his decision to shrink the [Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante] monuments, and we’ve received nothing. Who were the stakeholders in that process? Nothing. Inquiries into how rules and regulations are being changed have resulted in nothing.”
“The first thing we’re going to do will be to have him come before the committee and answer questions,” says Grijalva. “If necessary, we will use our subpoena power to get the information necessary. Beyond that, we will be a constant presence in the decision making [at DOI], and we will use the forum of public hearings on the committee to raise these issues, plus many more." (If you're old enough, you may remember a time before Bishop's leadership when public hearings were an important function of House committees.)
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