Enviros cherry pick judges, shut down CRP

Wild-eyed environmentalists in the state of Washington got a liberal judge appointed by President Jimmy Carter to issue a temporary restraining order to prevent emergency grazing of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) lands without an environmental impact statement.

CRP lands are under the purview of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, not the Environmental Protection Agency, and the judge's ruling is probably null and void on that issue alone. But the enviros filing the suit don't care, as the whole matter will be irrelevent in 60 days anyway, when the grazing season is over.

They will have won, and cattlemen will have sold off cattle prematurely because they have no grazing to hang on to them with. The rule of law is secondary to locking up and obstructing access to the land--and just stalling it off has the same practical effect as winning the lawsuit.

The real question is that we're talking about private land, usually owned by the same man getting temporary grazing rights to it. CRP land is not government land, trust land or public land in any way. The landowner, of his own free will, has placed the land with the CRP and received payments for not using it. If the USDA allows temporary, emergency grazing on the land, a right granted to them in the law, the landowner foregoes receiving CRP payments.

This case is the ultimate in judge shopping in filing a suit. Most judges would see that they had no jurisdiction, and would refuse to issue a temporary restraining order. You have to shop carefully to find an environmentalist judge who is more interested in the outcome than what the law says, and they did that.