Despite Promising Beginning,
Property Rights Fight Fizzled

As the nation sorts through the results of the 1996 elections — both presidential and congressional — one question merits consideration: whatever happened to property rights?

For the property rights movement, the contrast between the way 1995 began — with euphoria and excitement — and the way 1996 ended — not with a bang but a whimper — could not be more stark. In 1995, fresh from nationwide victories in the 1994 elections, the property rights movement was optimistic about the future. As 1996 drew to a close, hopes for significant legislative property rights victories were dashed as Congress punted on issue after issue: the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and property rights protection acts.

To make matters worse, it was not simply that Congress ran out of time to complete its work ensuring that economic growth and property rights did not continue to receive short shrift in environmental and federal lands legislation. The fact of the matter is that many in Congress abandoned the cause as too controversial.

This was particularly the case following President Clinton's public relations campaign beginning in late 1995, when he redefined his core values as a mantra: "medicare, medicaid, education and the environment." In a highly-publicized photo opportunity, Clinton, posing beside a babbling brook with a glass of clean water on the podium, accused his opponents of being "willing to put at risk the safety of our air, our food, our drinking water, the water we fish and swim in."

Al Gore said there was a "jihad on the environment," and even Hillary Rodham Clinton weighed in on behalf of children, saying they would not be able to "breathe clean air or drink clean water."

The rout was on. Frightened by the prospect of being portrayed as "anti-environment," many in Congress fled the fight, weakly whining that they were environmentalists too. Sensing victory, Clinton's supporters, including the billion-dollar-a-year environmental juggernaut, embarked upon an expensive nationwide ad campaign.

Not only did proponents of sensible environmental policy leave the Clinton lies unrebutted, they stopped telling their own stories about the human victims of environmental policy gone wild. Gone were the remarkable stories of ordinary human beings all but destroyed by heavy-handed federal bureaucrats enforcing, at least ostensibly, environmental policy: the rancher in Montana nearly killed by a grizzly bear, fined $5000 for killing the bear in self-defense; the residents of the rural community in Southern California burned out by federal orders to protect the kangaroo rat; the elderly family on Maryland's eastern shore whose land (their only nest egg) was seized as a federal wetland. The only response to the accusations by the Clintons, Gore, and environmental groups was a meek, "we care too."

But with polls showing that the public didn't trust Republicans to protect the environment, "we care too," wasn't enough if the issues were life and death. Without real-life human stories to reveal that the battle isn't about safety but about an unnecessarily burdensome, oppressive and covetous federal government, why trust "greedy" property rights proponents and their advocates in Congress? No wonder they lost.

Thus property rights and sensible environmental policy all but disappeared from the national political scene in the 1996 campaign — although it remained an important issue in state and local races, especially in the West. The one exception was the debate between Vice President Al Gore and Jack Kemp. In response to Kemp's thoughtful discussion of the constitutional requirement that the federal government pay "just compensation" when "private property" is put to "public use," Gore said that would be like paying polluters not to pollute. As evidence of how unreal the property rights debate had become, Gore's stunning statement passed virtually unnoticed.

However, as Clinton's own pollster, Celinda Lake, indicated, when the property rights issue goes head to head with "environmental" policy, the latter loses, and loses big! But "environmental" policy will continue to win so long as Clinton and environmental groups tell the better tale.