Utah Wants the Supreme Court to Give It Land Owned by All Americans

No state in recent years has been more aggressive than Utah, home to some of the nation’s most magnificent landscapes, in trying to seize control of land owned by the federal government.

In the “sagebrush rebellion” of the late 1970s to the early 1980s, challenges by Utah and other Western states to the federal government’s ownership of vast swaths of land within their borders got no traction in Congress or the courts. More recently, claims of federal land grabs and colonialism have been mostly pushed by extremists, like those who seized control of a National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon for a few weeks in 2016.

Now, with the U.S. Supreme Court firmly in the hands of a conservative majority, Utah’s leaders are making a Hail Mary move. The state is asking the court to bypass the lower federal courts, something it rarely does, to hear its argument that the federal government is required by the Constitution to transfer about half of the 37.4 million acres it owns in Utah to the state.

The court is expected to decide whether to take up the matter in mid-January. Should it agree to consider the case and side with Utah, tens of millions of acres of land across the West now owned by all Americans could be opened to largely unregulated exploitation of its mineral, fossil fuel, timber and grazing resources.

Utah and other states supporting its lawsuit see these lands, which the federal government reserved for all Americans when the states entered the union, as potential sources of tax revenue and development opportunities, and have long complained about the lack of local control over lands held by Washington.

Many of those resources are already being used or extracted under the federal government’s policies of allowing for multiple uses of the land while maintaining sustained yields of their renewable resources. But those lands also contain some the nation’s most culturally, historically and environmentally significant treasures, which the federal government also is responsible for protecting. Utah’s lawsuit is nothing less than a frontal assault on the long tradition of safeguarding these landscapes in trust for all Americans.