Buck In Brief

Not Fit to Serve: William Myers

In Brief: President Bush has nominated a long-time lobbyist for the livestock and mining industries to a lifetime seat on the nation's most important environmental court.

02/15/04

How can a man rejected by more than one-third of the panel of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary as "unqualified," and not considered "well-qualified" by a single member, be nominated for a lifetime seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit? Apparently, William Myers passes muster due to the ardent ideological and practical support he has demonstrated for the mining and grazing interests who employed him for most of his adult life and his lack of compunction about using public office to advance this private agenda.

William Myers has a long history of service to industry groups, such as grazing and logging, that are dependent on cheap and plentiful access to resources on federal lands. In private life, he has served as the Executive Director of the Public Lands Council, an organization representing "livestock operators who hold permits to graze livestock on public lands" that functions as an arm of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. The Public Lands Council has long-standing ties to the wise use movement and has been a member of its umbrella group, the Alliance for America. At the same time, he was director of federal lands for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

While working at the private firm of Holland and Hart (where his areas of legal expertise include "Bureau of Land Management authority, United States Forest Service authority and the use of federal lands by the livestock industry, the timber industry and other commodity groups") Myers was Corporate Counsel to The Cattleman Advocating Through Litigation Fund. This "non-profit organization that seeks to protect property rights, promote free enterprise and prevent regulatory abuse" is the litigating arm of the Public Lands Council and, thus, of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

In public life, Mr. Myers began working as legislative counsel to the very conservative U.S. Senator Alan K. Simpson (R-WY) in 1985. Myers was then Deputy General Counsel for Programs at the Department of Energy in the George H.W. Bush administration and served as an Assistant to the Attorney General in the United States Department of Justice. Most recently he was Interior Solicitor -- the general counsel for the Department of the Interior -- where he typically, if often incompetently, favored industry groups.

For example, Myers wrote a tortured interpretation of a statute claiming that "or" meant "and" in order to repudiate his predecessor's formal legal opinion and reverse the rejection of Glamis Mining Companies proposed cyanide heap-leach gold mine. This incredibly polluting mine would also have destroyed Quechan Indian Nation's sacred sites, but Myers did not even consult with the tribe's members or with other affected tribes. Fortunately, his interpretation was later overruled in a federal court which pointed out that it violated common sense rules of statutory interpretation and that "or" actually does mean "or."

Mr. Myers' other opinion as Interior Solicitor addressed whether conservation organizations could buy grazing leases on federal lands from ranchers willing to sell them and then retire those leases so the land could recover from decades of overgrazing. Mr. Myers withdrew and rewrote his opinion when it was pointed to him that his initial try actually worked in favor of a free market and conservation rather than the entrenched cattle industry.

Mr. Myers has gone to such great lengths and been so one-sided in his support of his former clients that he has been the subject of two ethics investigations. The first closed without finding actionable wrongdoing but did document continuous and questionable contact between him and the industry. The second, which involves an apparently illegal settlement with a grazer named H. Frank Robbins, is ongoing.

For all of Mr. Myer's ineptness as Interior Solicitor -- in more than two years he produced just two formal legal opinions and one "correction" of that second opinion -- he could do substantial damage as a lifetime member of the Ninth Circuit, with its significant docket of environmental and public lands cases. As Interior Solicitor he attempted to repeal or gut a wide range of basic environmental safeguards, and he is on record as opposing the California Desert Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, and federal management of public lands, which he compared to King George's rule over the American colonies.

His extreme legal philosophy includes elevating property rights as a "fundamental" right entitled to the highest level of protection. This belief, strictly applied, would make federal courts first and foremost guardians of property, and could lead to a wide range of labor, health, environmental, and civil rights laws being invalidated as unconstitutional.

With his nomination, the Bush administration is clearly extending to the courts its well-known practice of staffing federal agencies with lobbyists and lawyers drawn from the industries they are charged with regulating. That's a scary thought for all of us who count on a fair and balanced judiciary as the last line of defense for the environment. It's equally disturbing for anyone concerned with civil rights and other fundamental legal protections that we take for granted. If you have not done so already, I urge you to take action by asking your Senators to oppose William Myers' lifetime nomination.

As always, I encourage you to send me your comments and questions, which should be addressed to buckparker@earthjustice.org.

Vawter "Buck" Parker, Executive Director
buckparker@earthjustice.org