Original transcript, lightly edited:
No sooner than I had posted the podcast, We Are Not In Power, a few days ago — no sooner than that, the very next day perhaps — on how we do not need to surrender anymore as conservatives if we’re going to sustain the republic. If we are going sustain ,democracy we cannot surrender, we must compromise. Compromise must be real compromise, meaning it doesn’t take you away from the goal.
But no sooner had I posted that and talked about how Republicans have spent decades surrendering rather than compromising, the Republicans in Madison on the stewardship issue proposed surrender rather than compromise. They didn’t get away with it, not yet anyway.
Next week I’m going to have a guest, and this also involves stewardship, it involves conservation easements, and his name is Jason Hastings. He is a great guy. He is from Price County — that’s next door to where I live. He is a business owner over there, and he is also a county board supervisor. And as it happens, they’ve had a lot of these stewardship easement issues going on in Price County. He’s going to be here to take us through it. I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to be a fascinating podcast.
But if you don’t think we need to put a stop to all the land acquisitions — even though we have millions of acres of land — if you don’t think we need to pursue conservation easement reform— if you don’t think we need that, then you need to listen to this podcast, because it’ll open your eyes. These conservation easements are not about conservation, they are about woke profiteering, and more than that, they’re about foreign profiteering for the largest part…
Now, let’s talk about stewardship.
I got a note the other day. And it was from a reader after I had posted the other podcast, and after I had written about stewardship — and I’ve written about it ad nauseam, almost. And the reader, it wasn’t bad, it was just short and sweet. It’s like, you know, you need to stay out of the woods. You need to stay… I’m paraphrasing here… you need to stay off the water. You need to stay on concrete, and don’t go to the state parks.
And that was his reaction, because I guess he wants land acquisition, he wants this full-throttled stewardship program. And frankly, I don’t know what his political leanings are, but even some conservatives fall for this — fall for this pitch, this line.
And it really struck me as, you know, he may say that, but I don’t recall… I don’t know why I have to stay out of the state parks. I love the state parks. I haven’t advocated getting rid of any of the lands, although under a two-year review on the Assembly-passed version of this bill, which I support, they would review what lands we need to keep and review also what lands might need to be protected — or sold.
But I have never proposed getting rid of any of our state parks. In fact, the bill that I support, which is the version that the Assembly passed, actually increases funding to maintain and improve the properties the state already owns. Very important point. Land acquisition money, by and large, is being shifted to property improvement and maintenance. The state park system will benefit from the Assembly-passed version — which is the version, by the way, if you’re keeping track and you want to get in touch with your lawmakers, is the version that needs to be passed.
And, of course, some people might say, “Well, you know, yeah, but we could add more state parks if we got more money for land acquisition.” And that’s just not true. You’re not going to add more state parks. I mean, conceivably you could, but there’s a key point here.
This past week, after the Assembly passed what I thought was an acceptable, good bill, the Republican authors in the Senate came through and said, “We’re going to compromise and give $2.5 million to nonprofits for land acquisition.” That would be bad enough, if they said we’re going to go from virtually nothing for land acquisition beyond the Ice Age Trail and some minor below-five-acre parcels — that would be bad enough if they just gave it to the DNR for land acquisition. But they’re giving it to nonprofits.
And what this means is, the nonprofits aren’t using that money to buy land to create state parks. They’re using that money to slap conservation easements on those properties, and so they freeze the land in place — undeveloped land in place. Some of it is quite developable over the next 50 years if conditions change or there’s an economic opportunity. Some of it would never be developed anyway. But you foreclose any opportunity to do anything with those lands. And there aren’t going to be any state parks created on these lands.
Even the uses that are preserved under the terms of a conservation easement aren’t necessarily going to be protected. You might have a parcel now that is being logged for timber, and they preserve that use. Or you might have a parcel under a conservation easement that is being farmed, and so they say, in the fine print, we’re preserving the agricultural use — but that’s not the end of the fine print. The add-on to the fine print is that if conditions change, and we have to do something to preserve the top use, the top priority of the easement land, which is conservation, then we might have to sacrifice those other uses that are now being preserved, meaning we might have to end logging, we might have to end the timber industry’s activities there, we might have to end farming on those lands.
The only thing that is preserved in perpetuity is the conservation. No matter if economic conditions change, and no matter if environmental conditions change, such that lands that were once considered necessary to be protected are no longer considered necessary to be protected, only conservation remains. It’s a big scam.
That takes us to original intent.
The Assembly bill was a good compromise, I thought, because it preserves the original intent of the stewardship program. The original intent of the stewardship program was not to create a land-buying machine that would gobble up land forever. It was meant to be a program that would sunset in 10 years, that the state would go out and scour and inventory what properties — what sensitive habitats and properties — needed to be preserved. We would spend the money, we would bond for that money, we would preserve those lands, and then the program would end and government would get out of the land-buying business.
And after that, if a property needed to be protected, it could be considered by the state legislature and the agency, the DNR, on a case-by-case basis. A very, very reasonable approach to conservation.
And so… the Assembly bill ended the land acquisition portion for at least two years, and authorized — or demanded, required — a study to see just exactly what lands that we need to protect, what are the real land needs of the state of Wisconsin, and then we go from there. That doesn’t take us away from the original goal; it actually takes us toward the original goal and is a good compromise.
But when you turn around and say we’re going to give $2.5 million to nonprofits so they can just continue to acquire land through conservation easement, we continue the folly of throwing money down the toilet and taking good land off the tax rolls.
Where are we with the stewardship program? Well, where we are is we have 30% of some counties — more than 30% of the county where I live, in Oneida County — publicly owned. We’ve got 17% of the state publicly owned. We’ve got one out of every six acres publicly owned. How many more do we need?
We’re $530 million — at least we were last April — $530 million in debt. And that’s another point about the stewardship program. Most of this money is not money that is budgeted, allocated out of tax revenue in the general fund. It’s borrowed. And then we’ve got to pay it back, and we’ve got to pay interest on that as well. And as of last April, as I say, it was $530 million.
Do we need more state parks? Well, maybe we need to make a discussion about that. But right now, we have 50 state parks and about 156,000 acres of land for state parks. I love state parks. Is that enough? Probably so — especially when you consider that that’s just the parks. When you take a look at the entire park system — the trails, the forest, the properties that surround the actual park perimeter — it’s 1.2 million acres.
I will hopefully enjoy those. We need to sustain them, we need to improve them, we need to maintain the infrastructure, and that’s what the Assembly bill does. The proposed Senate bill, which has been sent back to committee, does not do that. It continues to allow the nonprofits to run wild. And once again, we have been set up for a defeat — set up for surrender rather than compromise on this legislation.
Now, some breaking news this morning also feeds into this whole thing about compromise and surrender. The Supreme Court of the United States has just ruled, on a 6–3 vote, that Trump’s tariffs are unconstitutional. I know a lot of conservatives had weighed in on those lawsuits with briefs opposing Trump’s constitutional authority to impose the tariffs under the Emergency Powers Act. And frankly, this was a decision that did not surprise me. It could have very, very negative consequences.
No matter how you feel about the tariffs, let’s just take a look at the raw numbers: they were going to provide about two and a half trillion dollars over the next decade. Not all of it will disappear, but it’s going to take a deep, deep hit. There’s going to have to be refunds given that are going to total hundreds of billions of dollars.
Now, Trump is not completely defeated on this. The mainstream media will tell you he is, but he isn’t. There are tariffs — like on aluminum and steel — that aren’t affected by this. There are also other statutes that Trump can use to levy tariffs, such as the 1974 Trade Act, which allows the president to levy taxes when there are unfair trade practices, when another country is found to have committed or engaged in unfair trade practices. We have long found that about China and other nations. So it’s not going to end them totally, but clearly it’s more of an obstacle now for his agenda.
But the real question is: why doesn’t Congress step in and make a statement on the tariffs? Because essentially, the Supreme Court decision said that that is Congress’s jurisdiction. And so there’s a good argument to be made that it is, in fact, Congress’s jurisdiction — except for those narrow statutes that Trump can now use.
And so the message I would take is: the Republicans need to stand up and fulfill their constitutional responsibility. They need to go on the record and have a vote on the tariffs. A lot of conservatives I know don’t like the tariffs. I happen to support the tariffs. But however you stand on the issue, Congress now should stand up and vote yay or nay on Trump’s tariffs while we have the majority and Trump can sign them into place, or not, and let the American people decide — based on the economic consequences or benefits, as the case may be, down the road — who was right and who was wrong.
Once again, this is a form of surrender if Congress just relies on the Supreme Court to make its say and then go away and leave the Trump administration to deal with the aftermath.
And by the way, for those interested in the votes: you had the three liberals voting against the administration — that’s Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan. You had Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts joining them for the six votes against the administration, and you had Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh voting, siding with the Trump administration.
It’s a fascinating argument, but it’s one that Congress needs to be involved in. It’s a debate and deliberation Congress needs to be involved in, and too often they’re not involved in any of it — which is really part, if not most, of the problem.
That’s all I have for today. Please contact your legislators in the Senate, particularly, and tell them how you feel on the stewardship bill. We don’t need to be more surrender here. We need compromise. We need to get on the bandwagon, put an end to this program, and then, again, go back to the Assembly version of this bill.
It requires a two-year review of the program. All the agencies can get involved. The legislature can get involved. The stakeholders can get involved. Property rights advocates can get involved and see what this program is, what it has been doing, what it is all about, and where we need to head with it. That is the common sense way to go: to pass the Assembly version that’s before us now.
