Utah Lawmakers Hint at “War” in Federal Land Dispute
Nov. 13, 2024— The New Republic
In a long-running fight with Washington, the Beehive State’s top politicos have found a novel way to escalate the conflict with the Supreme Court.
Back in August, the state of Utah filed an unusual lawsuit directly before the Supreme Court that sought to wrest control of millions of acres of federal public lands. Disputes over federal land policies in the West can be emotionally charged at times. But more recently, Utah’s congressional delegation took what could only be called an extraordinary step—arguing that the status quo could potentially “justify” civil war.
In a friend of the court brief submitted in October, the six federal lawmakers—Senators Mike Lee and Mitt Romney, as well as Utah’s four House representatives—likened their state to a separate “country” that was being “occupied” by the United States. Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman, a fellow Republican, also joined the brief.
The federal government denies Utah basic sovereign powers over more than one-third of its territory for no constitutional purpose. And both common sense and history confirm that, if anything would justify war, it is one country’s continued occupation of another. Such occupation, after all, necessarily entails the exploitation of resources belonging to the other and an unnecessary risk that the occupying country will hinder the occupied country’s political processes. Indeed, the Constitution’s drafters were themselves prepared to take action (and did) against an abusive federal power for much less.
Having raised such dire implications, the delegation then tried to back away from this argument almost immediately. “That is not to say that Utah, as part of the federal system of sovereignty, would be justified in actually going to war against the United States,” the brief continued in the next paragraph. “Not at all. The unique relationship between the states and the federal government means that what the United States is doing to Utah is not directly analogous to one sovereign nation’s physical invasion of another.”
