Mike Rosen: Enviro bullying won't fly

The Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment is a nonprofit educational organization - associated with Montana State University - that conducts seminars and conferences, and issues publications to advance conservation and environmental values in the real world. As the foundation explains it, "While our seminars are explicitly pro-environment, they explain why ecological values are not the only important ones. We stress that trade-offs among competing values are inescapable. We show why it is ethically and materially irresponsible to pretend such choices can be avoided."

The foundation's chairman is Dr. John Baden, a scholar who merges ecological concerns with free-market economic principles, addressing environmental issues "in a new shade of green." Eighty-seven percent of the foundation's funding comes from other foundations, 11 percent from corporations and the rest from individuals.

Environmentalist zealots don't like real-world trade-offs that disturb their uncompromising, dogmatic purism. The Community Rights Counsel is a liberal, special-interest law firm that litigates enviro causes, often joining leftist coalitions to advance their common agenda. For example, the law firm was part of the Coalition for a Fair and Independent Judiciary (along with the usual suspects: MoveOn.org, AFL-CIO, Feminist Majority, People for the American Way, NAACP, La Raza, National Abortion Federation, etc.) that fought the nomination of Miguel Estrada to the federal bench. George Soros, who reportedly spent more than $30 million in an attempt to defeat George W. Bush in the last election, has been a major contributor to the firm.

For the last six years, Community Rights Counsel has been hassling the foundation, with the aid and comfort of friends in the liberal media, about the attendance of judges at foundation seminars and the presence of four judges on its board of trustees (the judicial Code of Conduct encourages judges to sit on boards of nonprofit educational organizations). Last month, three of those four judges took the path of least resistance and resigned from the foundation board. The remaining board member, Danny J. Boggs, chief judge of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, refused to be intimidated and held his ground. So Community Rights Counsel pursued a formal complaint of judicial misconduct against Boggs, asserting that the foundation's seminars were "corporate-financed, one-sided diatribes" and that federal judges shouldn't be associated with the organization.

The complaint was duly investigated by Chief Judge James Loken of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. His recent ruling thoroughly vindicated Boggs and dismissed all of the law firm's charges, concluding that they "lack(ed) sufficient evidence to raise an inference that misconduct has occurred" and that "the allegations \[of misconduct] lack any factual foundation or are conclusively refuted by objective evidence." Loken's opinion was informed by the glowing appraisal of the foundation's programs from Judge Richard S. Arnold, a colleague on the 8th Circuit, and by an audit of the foundation by two former U.S. attorneys (who served under President Clinton).

Further, Loken spanked the Community Rights Counsel, noting that, ". . . these allegations typify the character assassination that is all too common in our nation's capital, much of it intended to further the accuser's legislative agenda. By use of this tactic, it is the complainant (Community Rights Counsel) who is undermining public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary, not the judges complained of."

Community Rights Counsel's hypocrisy is chutzpah on steroids. Corporate funding is somehow evil when it supports the foundation's seminars that educate attendees about market solutions, but benign when it comes from the likes of George Soros to underwrite the law firm's anti-market litigation.

Judges have no business attending the foundation's seminars because Community Rights Counsel disagrees with the foundation's viewpoint, but it's perfectly all right for judges to attend seminars conducted by the Aspen Institute because the law firm agrees with the institute's liberal agenda. In its July 2000 report attacking the foundation, Community Rights Counsel conceded that 75 judges had attended 88 Aspen Institute programs but claimed that the firm's "research into the Aspen Institute revealed no overwhelming bias." What a surprise: Liberals don't detect a liberal bias. (And note the clever inclusion of the word "overwhelming.")

Judges are big boys and girls. We can't and shouldn't lock them in a closet and insulate them from other people's opinions. Good heavens, they read The New York Times and listen to National Public Radio. We'll just have to trust them to digest information and think for themselves. But they're only human. Like the rest of us, they already have biases. Some are able to temper them better than others. Community Rights Counsel is a combatant in the war of ideas, just as the foundation is. That's healthy in an open society like ours. What's not healthy is when Community Rights Counsel tries to use the courts to gag the opposition.

It is so important to know that there IS such a thing as free-market environmentalism out there. I don't like it when conservatives accept the canard that being conservative means being anti-environment. The socialist wackos have utterly tarred and perverted the once commonsensical, grassroots movement that owes it's origins to the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. I wish some conservative publication could list the sane environmental/conservation organizations out there.

There's nothing lefty about wise stewardship. Certainly in all my years I've found the only environmental initiatives that did any real good were based in enlightened self-interest, careful trade-offs and economic incentive.

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