Unrelated events in recent days demonstrate conclusively that Jimmy Carter was the nation’s worst president, even worse than Joe Biden, who only pretended to be president. Carter was actually running the show in the late 1970s, and he made a mess of things.
First, although most commentators acknowledge that today’s events in Iran began in November 1979, they err by pointing to the day Islamic radicals seized 66 American hostages. In truth, they began when Carter, after rushing the shah of Iran out, welcomed back the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whom his advisors called a “Gandhi-like figure,” “a saint,” and a man of “impeccable integrity and honesty.”
President Donald Trump and the brave men and women of our rededicated armed forces with Operation Epic Fury, which began Feb. 28, are making things right and ending the nearly 50-year-old threat to the United States, American troops, and our allies abroad.
Second, in January, Trump reversed another Carter catastrophe by putting finishing touches on a court-ordered restructuring of how federal agencies implement the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.
Often called a foundational environmental law that ushered in the so-called environmental decade, NEPA was enacted nearly unanimously and signed, without ceremony, by President Richard Nixon on New Year’s Day, 1970. But regrettably, soon after Carter took office, he launched what one legal scholar labeled “the most ambitious presidential foray into the nation’s environmental protection effort: the transformation of [an office in the White House] from an advisory entity into a regulatory agency.”
Over time, under White House control, NEPA became the largest roadblock to “major federal action[s]” and with them projects, jobs, and economic activity. Forum-shopping radical environmental groups sought out federal judges who, bound only by the requirement that NEPA documents be found to have taken a “hard look” at the proposed project, approved actions they favored and killed those they opposed. When the Biden administration arrived, it broadened White House oversight to include “environmental justice” and “climate change,” while expediting wind and solar projects.
After the 2024 election, however, the nation’s second-highest federal court ruled that what Carter did nearly fifty years earlier was illegal. Concluded the appeals court, “[White House] regulations, which purport to govern how all federal agencies must comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, are ultra vires.” Running roughshod over NEPA from the White House was doomed. The incoming Trump administration did not appeal, it began immediately to comply. Westerners are thrilled.
Third, speaking of the West, Carter believed he owed his election to radical environmentalists and, at their urging, declared war on rural westerners, especially those who depended on federal lands for their livelihoods. Western governors, most of them Democrats, were outraged by his actions. Until the Georgia peanut farmer came along, management of western federal lands had been a bipartisan enterprise: Democrats and Republicans alike supported building dams, grazing livestock, producing oil and gas, exploring and mining ore, and logging and milling timber on federal lands.
Bipartisan too was the “Sagebrush Rebellion” that erupted in response to Carter’s “War on the West,” but it was Ronald Reagan, former governor of California — half of which is owned by the federal government — who said in response, “Count me in as a rebel.” Just before taking office, Reagan telegrammed fellow rebels in Salt Lake City, advising that there was a new sheriff in town and promising a “Sagebrush Solution” by ensuring “states have an equitable share of public lands and their natural resources.”
Reagan quelled the rebellion by consulting with western governors and by restoring multiple use and sustained yield, as mandated by Congress years earlier, which governs how most federal lands — not including parks, monuments, or wilderness areas — are managed. For Reagan, that meant utilizing the vast oil and gas potential of federal lands, by which he foresaw American energy independence and the solution to the energy, economic, and international crises created by Carter.
For Democrats, however, the die was cast by Carter’s enthusiastic embrace of radical environmentalists, truly “Merchants of Despair.” For example, by 2020, every Democratic presidential candidate promised, as to America’s rich federal energy resources, “Leave it in the ground.”
TRUMP KILLS MONTANA BUFFALO COMMONS
Thus, upon taking office, Biden stopped issuing federal oil and gas leases. Only President Truman, for whom the Outer Continental Shelf was unavailable, issued fewer. Worse yet, Biden ended “multiple use and sustained yield” of federal lands, killed logging, mining, and grazing, among other economic uses, and perversely redefined “conservation,” which means wise use, as preservation. Soon, fortunately, Trump will end that legacy of the Carter years.
It is hard to believe one man could get so much wrong and that his legacy of incompetence would last half a century. Unfortunately, he and it did. The good news, just in time for the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday: Trump is setting things right.
Mr. Pendley, a Marine, Wyoming attorney, and Colorado-based, public-interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court of the United States, served in the Reagan administration, and led the Bureau of Land Management for President Trump.