A federal judge in Montana ordered the dismissal in September 2020 of William Perry Pendley as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, an agency of the Department of the Interior.
Judge Brian Morris ruled that Pendley had illegally served in the position for 424 days.
Morris’s decision came after Montana Gov. Steve Bullock filed a lawsuit saying that Pendley was “illegally overseeing an agency that manages almost a quarter-billion acres of land, primarily in the U.S. West,” The Associated Press reported.
The ruling will be immediately appealed, Interior Department spokesman Conner Swanson said.
He called it “an outrageous decision that is well outside the bounds of the law.”
https://apnews.com/article/472201d09bc69de32fbf3e110c094fa6
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/25/917116718/judge-ousts-trumps-public-lands-chief
Not quite.
The United States requires that such appointments be approved by the U.S. Senate.
Trump argues that he doesn’t have to comply with the U.S. Constitution because . . . he doesn’t know what it is.
Judge Morris rejected Trump’s argument that the con man had more authority than the Constitution.
The judge’s decision was a rebuke of Trump’s practice of putting people in influential positions without first being approved by the U.S. Senate. Trump had hired several officials as “acting” administrators to run federal agencies and department without having them approved by the Senate, the Associated Press said.
https://apnews.com/article/472201d09bc69de32fbf3e110c094fa6
Pendley was yet another Trump appointee who was unqualified to perform the duties of the position, either as an administrator or as a human being.
U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana, applauded Judge Morris’ decision.
Tester had earlier written to David Bernhardt, the Secretary of the Interior, urging him to remove Pendley, who had repeatedly expressed his desire to “sell off America’s public lands.” Tester also mentioned that Pendley had to recuse himself from the Bureau of Land Management’s portfolio because of what Tester termed “various flagrant conflicts of interest.”
The administration announced that Pendley had been appointed to serve as the bureau’s acting director in July 2019.
This decision had the moral equivalency of hiring a bank robber to run the Treasury Department.
Pendley wanted to manage America’s public lands by selling them.
But this was just the beginning of the offensiveness and idiocy of Pendley’s statements and opinions.
CNN reported that Pendley has “repeatedly denied existence of climate change,” calling it “junk science.” He called climate change believers “kooks.” He once claimed in a speech to the Heritage Foundation there was “no credible evidence of a hole in the ozone layer.”
He also compared the environmental movement to “communism.”
“‘Environmentalism’ is indeed the last refuge of the left, the last safe haven for those who trust, not the people, but big government, those who seek to place the power in the hands of federal bureaucrats,” Pendley said. “No wonder the environmental message has became the cause of choice for the elitists of Hollywood. It should not surprise us that they have embraced environmentalism with the same self-righteous fervor as they once embraced socialism and communism.”
In addition, CNN reported, that Pendley claimed that Islam “was at war with the United States” and “compared undocumented immigrants to cancer and blamed them for diseases.”
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/08/politics/william-perry-pendley-blm-kfile/index.html
Furthermore, he wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Examiner that the Black Lives Movement was “built on a lie,” he said, “a lie the mainstream media perpetrated, that cowardly politicians, fearful of saying ‘all lives matter,’ emboldened, a lie that spread like cancer through inner cities endangering men and women in blue and the citizens who look to them for protection.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/black-lives-matter-began-with-a-lie
Trump withdrew Pendley’s appointment to run the Bureau of Land Management when it was clear the president did not have the votes in the Senate – even among some Republicans — to confirm him.
Pendley continued to lead the bureau after his nomination was withdrawn until he was ordered to vacate the position by Judge Morris’ decision.
There was no permanent director of the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 10 percent of the country’s land, during the Trump Administration.
