Matt Dalley retweetledi
Here's the reality behind everything in CD3 politics: whoever controls the land ends up controlling the people who live on it.
Right now, the federal government controls 67 percent of Utah. Not individual Utahns, not the state, not the counties, not the communities that depend on this land. Washington does. And that control is exercised by exactly two presidential appointees: the Director of the Bureau of Land Management and the Director of the U.S. Forest Service. These two people exercise more practical authority over what happens on Utah soil than the governor of this state.
Think about what that means for your constituents. These unelected federal bureaucrats decide whether a ranching family can graze cattle on land their ancestors worked for seven generations. They decide whether a coal miner or uranium developer can access proven reserves beneath monument boundaries. They decide whether a small community lives or dies.
The Tenth Amendment reserves to the states all powers not delegated to the federal government. Article IV, Section 4 guarantees every state a republican form of government, meaning the people affected by policies actually get to vote out the people who make them. In Utah, that guarantee is hollow.
I've spent 15 years fighting this reality. When the BLM illegally closed Recapture Canyon in 2007, a historic route cattlemen had used since pioneer days, I organized an ATV protest ride in 2014 to challenge it. In December 2020, President Trump granted me a full pardon because he understood what that fight represented: a weaponized prosecution of local people standing up to federal tyranny.
As a state legislator, my first bill was HB179 to protect RS2477 road rights-of-way the BLM had been closing without legitimate legal authority. I opposed the Bears Ears land exchange because it represented a failure of fiduciary responsibility to the people of Utah. I ran for governor on a platform that put state sovereignty and local control at the center. My last bill in the legislature was also related to RS2477. It passed on the final day of my final session and was signed into law in the last hour of the last night. It stated that a road must remain open and in use during adjudication. That one sentence changes everything. Without it, environmental groups could shut a road simply by adjudicating it, tying the case up in court for 10 to 20 years while the road fell into disrepair and no one could use it. With this law, the road stays open while the legal battle plays out. They can litigate all they want, but the land stays accessible to the people who depend on it.
This is the foundational fight. Everything else flows from this: whether CD3 can develop its energy resources, whether families can keep their ranches, whether water stays in Utah or flows to California, whether communities can manage their own forests and land.
You need a congressman who has already been in this fight, who understands the constitutional issues, who has personally sacrificed to defend local control. Not someone who will learn these issues after the election.
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