February 13, 2004
An Enemy of the Environment

The Bush administration has a troubling record of putting lobbyists in influential positions in the executive branch. Now it is taking the practice a step further by nominating a longtime lawyer and lobbyist for the mining and cattle industries, William Myers III, to an important judgeship. His extreme views on the environment, his hard-edged ideological approach to the law and his close ties to industries whose cases he would be deciding make Mr. Myers unqualified to be an appeals court judge.

Until recently, Mr. Myers was the chief legal officer in the Interior Department. Before that, he was a mining industry lawyer and lobbyist and, earlier still, the director of federal lands for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. A partisan advocate for the interests of the industries he represented, as well as a harsh critic of environmental protections, Mr. Myers regularly took positions that, though legally insupportable, would have had a devastating impact on the environment. He argued in one Supreme Court case that Congress does not have the power under the Constitution to protect wetlands. He also demonstrated a lack of judicial temperament, at one point comparing federal land management to "the tyrannical actions of King George in levying taxes" on the American colonies.

Mr. Myers's defenders argue that it is wrong to confuse his advocacy with how he would act as a judge. But since he has spent so much of his career working for industry, there is little else to evaluate him on. At Interior, he had an obligation to represent the public more broadly, but continued to carry water for special interests. His hometown newspaper, The Idaho Statesman, editorialized that although he had stated in applying for the job that he had "no particular ax to grind," he had ended up acting "less like an attorney, and more like an apologist for his old friends in the cattle industry."

Mr. Myers has been nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, which plays a critical role in overseeing the Western states, where environmental disputes have been most heated. The Senate should insist that the president nominate someone with a proven record of defending broader public interests, rather than those of a powerful few.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/opinion/...print&position=