Have you ever said something you wish you could take back? Pretty much all of us are familiar with foot-in-mouth disease.
But that, apparently, is not how former U.S. Congressman Steve Pearce feels about calling, in 2012, for the sale of public lands in the West, arguing “most of it we do not even need.”
Despite his vast experience in the extraction industry, or perhaps because of it, Pearce is President Donald Trump’s nominee for director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 245 million acres, a 10th of the country. At his confirmation hearing with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last week, the most aggressive questioner may have been Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, who asked Pearce about his 2012 comment.
