http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2013/endangered-species-act-11-22-2013.html
For Immediate Release, November 22, 2013
Contact: Brett Hartl, (202) 817-8121
Tea Party Bill Would Eviscerate Endangered Species Act
As America Celebrates 40th Anniversary of Landmark Law, Right-wing Senators Seek to Tear It Apart
WASHINGTON— Tea Party senators introduced a bill this week that would effectively end the protection of most endangered species in the United States and gut some of the most important provisions of the Endangered Species Act. Senate Bill 1731, introduced by Tea Party Sens. Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Dean Heller, would end protections for most of the species that are currently protected by the Act and make it virtually impossible to protect new species under the law. It would also eliminate protection for habitat that’s critical to the survival of rare and struggling animals and plants around the country.
“Here we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act this year, and the Tea Party wants to tear it limb from limb,” said Brett Hartl, endangered species policy director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s really a sad testament to how out of touch the Tea Party has become with the American people, and how beholden they are to industry special interests that are more interested in profits than saving wildlife, wild places and a livable future for the next generation.”
In its 40-year history, the Endangered Species Act has been more than 99 percent successful at preventing extinction for wildlife under its protection and has put hundreds of plants and animals on the path to recovery, including bald eagles, grizzly bears, whales and sea turtles.
Despite this successful track record, the bill’s most extreme provision would require that every five years all protected species be removed from the list of threatened and endangered species, eliminating all legal protections. No matter how close to extinction they might be, every listed species would then have to wait until Congress passed a joint resolution renewing their protections under the Act for another five years. Five years later, this process would start over again, eliminating all protections until Congress passed another joint resolution.
“The strength of the Endangered Species Act — in fact all of our nation’s environmental laws — comes from the requirement that science, not politics, guide the protection of our wildlife, air and water,” said Hartl. “This bill would allow extreme ideologues in Congress to veto environmental protections for any protected species they wanted, just so they could appease their special-interest benefactors.”
The bill would eliminate all protections for the critical habitat of endangered species and allow state governments to effectively veto any conservation measures designed to protect an imperiled species within their respective state. Meanwhile federal wildlife agencies would need to complete onerous accounting reports to estimate the costs of protecting endangered species rather than completing tangible, on-the-ground conservation activities to protect species and the places they live.
“This bill would devastate species protections and open the door to log, mine and pave some of the last places on Earth where these animals survive,” Hartl said. “It’s a boon for profiteers like the Koch Brothers but will rob every American who values wildlife and wild places.”
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 625,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.
Exposing the Big Game 
Probably most of us wolf lovers and wildlife and wildlife habitat and environmentalists are disappointed in the Obama administration but many also seem to forget that it would have been a disaster under McCain-Palin or Romney-Ryan. There is a lot of anti EPA and ESA sentiment in republican ranks, and some democratic too, and especially at state legislative levels. It makes policy/platform sense in that republicans hate federal control and EPA and ESA cut across state lines and often interfere with unfettered state level extraction industry activities, ranching, farming, and hunting. Republicans lean heavily toward unfettered capitalism, state economic control and play to rural control constituencies. They also play to the red flag issues. In 2012 the very conservative Montana legislature introduced over 50 anti-wildlife bills and the democrats introduced around 7 pro wildlife bills. The Montana legislature as will as other far right state legislatures have been very, bat sh– crazy, anti-wolf and are the wolf massacre states. Relatively small groups, sportsmen-ranchers-rural constituencies often rule these legislatures. It is the goal of the tea party to work on control at the state levels to in turn promote their agenda. Unfortunately, the Republican Party looks like the so-called tea party at the leadership level and any moderates are being very quiet for fear of retaliation. The Republican Party has been playing to this constituency and the red flag issues (God, Guns, Gays (anti), Greed (unfettered capitalism), Genocide (military-industrial complex), and Gynecology (telling women what they can do with their bodies) for so long, decades now, that they have lost control of the party. It is not in the interests of wolf and other predator lovers, ESA and EPA interests, to elect republicans right now.
I think its time everyone starts voting third party or this is just gonna continue to get worse!
I’m not sure what to think about politics anymore. The world is so full of evil, greed and hatred I think that the native beliefs about a new era are correct. This world as we know it must change drastically for our survival