BOTH ID Republican Senators + MT’s Daines Now Against Public Land Sale In Senate Proposal

UPDATED 9:46 A.M, JUNE 22, 2025

Both of Idaho’s US Senators as well as Montana’s Steve Daines came out against a plan in Congress to sell off 2 to 3 million acres of Forest Service and BLM land across the West.

Senator Jim Risch (R) “does not support the proposed provision to sell public land in the reconciliation bill,” said his spokesperson Madison Hardy, according to a report by Eric Barker of the Lewiston Tribune out late Friday morning.

That afternoon, Barker doubled up his scoop with comments from a spokesperson for Senator Mike Crapo (R): “After a careful and thorough review of the legislative text in the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee reconciliation title, Senator Crapo does not support the proposed language to sell public lands.”

And then late in the day came word that Senator Steve Daines (R-Montana) was also against it, Barker tweeted: “Senator Daines is opposed to selling public land and is opposed to Senator Lee’s proposal,” the senator’s spokesperson Matt Lloyd informed the paper.

Hunters, anglers, hikers and other public lands advocates will be thrilled to hear the news because Risch’s, Crapo’s and Daines’s opposition narrow the odds for Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and his deeply unpopular proposal.

Ostensibly, it’s about creating creating housing and development in rural areas, but where does opening this door end? For Lee, who likened public land ownership to Marxism, when it’s all in private hands.

But Lee’s tweet and an op-ed in the business-friendly Wall Street Journal this week may be signs of increasing desperation.

Indeed, “Hunters now have a real chance to defeat the public land sales bill,” is the headline of an Outdoor Life article the well-respected Andrew McKean published Friday.

He quotes fellow Montanan Randy Newberg, who terms Lee’s proposal “the biggest threat to public lands and public lands access in my lifetime” and adds, “But I’m encouraged that if we can change the minds of at least four Republican Congressmen, that we might be able to stop this thing.”

Newberg, an elk hunter, public land proponent and podcaster, reported to McKean that the phones are ringing off the hook in Washington, DC, like never before on this issue –– and that’s even before Backcountry Hunters and Anglers’ “Flood the Lines” day scheduled for Wednesday, June 25.

“The tone has changed almost 180 degrees in just a couple days,” Newberg added, recalling how when he arrived in the nation’s capital, he was told “I was making something out of nothing,” but as he left DC after a week, he was “excited about how motivated and engaged our community of hunters and public-land users is over this.”

Republicans have only a narrow cushion in the Senate, and so that makes the trio’s opposition to this element of the so-called Big Beautiful Bill ever more precarious.

While Lee maintains that hunters will not lose access to their hunting grounds, I laid out EXACTLY why those who prowl the Methow Valley and other federal lands next to getaway communities and highly attractive landscapes have every reason to fear a big old McMansion plopped down where their deer camp sits now if the senator’s proposal comes to pass.

Newberg and McKean, far more eloquent speakers and writers than I, lay out how to talk to your Congressman – Republican or Democrat, Westerner, Midwesterner, Southerner or Easterner alike – in hopes that senatorial leadership will quietly pull the proposal.

Please chime in.