Last week’s biggest under-reported story was the U.S. Senate’s confirmation hearing for Sally Jewell, CEO of outdoor retailer REI and President Obama’s nominee to be Secretary of the Interior.
It’s easy to see why this story is big: the Department of the Interior holds the deed to 417 million acres—18.4 percent of the land mass of the United States—and its policies also extend beyond the land to affect the oceans and the Great Lakes. These are lands and waters that are exploited for oil and gas and minerals. And timber. Ranchers use them, as do the people who hike and fish and buy equipment from REI.
Some of these interests are mutually exclusive—intensely mutually exclusive—so we would have expected a little heat at the hearing, if not a slugfest. Especially at a time when some states (looking at you, Utah) are trying to force the feds to relinquish their hold on some federal lands. And when, as we noted last September, the National Park Service has prepared a list of 30 national parks where oil and gas drilling “is a good possibility.” (That’s in addition to the 12 national parks where it’s already happening.)
Instead, Jewell answered questions that were, according to the Atlantic’s excellent report, “sycophantic even by Congressional standards.” And Jewell bounced those softballs right back to the senators. (Although, in what could be taken as an initial staking-out of her priorities, she did point out that “the Interior Department generated more than $12 billion in revenue from energy production last year, and that visitors to national parks generated an estimated $30 billion in economic activity.”)
It’s predictable that Jewell wouldn’t want to pick a fight with her interrogators. And she might have leaned a bit toward them, in case anyone was worried about her endorsements from the Wilderness Society and the National Resources Defense Council.
But you can’t help but feel like there should have been more going on here. Virtually every other nomination is met with rancor and inflated rhetoric. How does Jewell skate by, when she’s been tapped to oversee such a huge storehouse of America’s treasures, which are contested by so many diverse and oppositional constituencies?
This has to gall Susan Rice.
