The other thing that gripes me about Senator Hatch and Congressman 

 Santini. is that in the 1930's there was a bill passed called the Hatch 

 Act'-vv^o was a different senator. This senator was from New Mexico, and 

 the bffl's intent was to protect federal employees from political influence. 

 But in the case of Senator Hatch today, it's a shield. It largely protects 

 Senator Hatch from any rebuttal by BLM employees. They are prohibited 

 from becoming involved in political controversy, so they must sit back and 

 lake his insults, his distortions and his rather outrageous half truths. 

 And Senator Hatch is confident that they will not answer his charge. And 

 so Senator Hatch hides behind the Hatch Act-- a cowards way of dealing 

 with a controversy he himself has generated. Let's take the case of 

 Congressman Santini, who I used to know when I lived in Nevada. 

 Congressman Santini is a very bright man and I respect his intelligence 

 very much. But when I was there he once called for some solutions in 

 front of a group of miners--about 200 miners--solutions to the BLM, short 

 of assassination. He practically invited violence against these public 

 servants knowing, like Senator Hatch, that they will not respond. They 

 could not respond. And a few nights ago I watched Congressman Santini 

 on national television on the McNeal-Lehr Report. One of the newsmen 

 asked Congressman Santini how this 1976 Federal Land Policy and 

 Management Act passed. Santini had the... let's say temerity .. .to 

 suggest... to say that it passed because there were only 30 western 

 congressmen and they were out-voted by over 400 urban and eastern 

 congressmen. Well, nothing could be further from the truth and nothing 

 could be more cynical and I am sure that Jim Santini knows this. Jim 

 Santini sat on that Interior Committee when that bill passed. He knows 

 that that bill was pushed through the House by members like John 

 Melcher, who has been in the House and chairman of the subcommittee 

 involved, Morris Udall and Tino Roncalio of Wyoming. He knows that his 

 amendments were passed and had a great deal of influence on the 

 legislation. And finally, Jim Santini knows that he himself voted for the 

 passage of FLPMA. And yet on national television as I sat there, his 

 cynical answer and his very dishonest answer was that somehow that bill 

 was forced down the throats of poor unsuspecting westerners. Well, I 

 think that one of the results of the rather outrageous statements and 

 distortions has been that the Sagebrush Rebellion has developed--at least 

 in the academic community of the West--as a sort of new McCarthyism. 

 And there's a haunting refrain. It's a regional movement, not national. 

 It's confined to the Department of the Interior and and not the Department 

 of State. But both movements developed rapidly and they reached a 

 fevered pitch on a tissue of lies. And like McCarthyism, the Sagebrush 

 Rebellion has been masked by patriotic fervor and principled rhetoric, but 

 it's not supported by facts of history. And like McCarthyism, it has 

 generated a great deal of hatred toward a group of public servants--this 

 time dedicated land managers instead of people in the State Department and 

 the Defense Department. And finally it has joined McCarthy era. The 

 academic community in the West appears to have either acquiesced or tried 

 to ignore the Sagebrush Rebellion. Western universities receive their 

 support for funds in buildings and pay raises from state legislatures. 

 And many of these same people are strong supporters of the Sagebrush 

 Rebellion. And I wonder where the leaders are of the western natural 

 resource academic community. Perhaps they value their next pay increase, 

 their next building or laboratory more than their respect for facts. They 



