By ALEX GIMARC
If you play sports long enough, you eventually play against (or with) someone who is viewed as a dirty player.
In basketball, this is generally seen as throwing elbows or undercutting you when you drive, shoot or rebound. Sometimes the foul is called. Usually, it isn’t. Your first job is to make sure you don’t get hurt. Your second is to make sure the miscreant suffers sufficient painful return fire that he (or she) chooses to apply their dirty skills elsewhere.
President Donald Trump, true to his word, signed an executive order this week restoring the name of Mount McKinley.
This was return fire to Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s loud promise to install herself as the “resident opposition” to Trump during his second term.
Lisa’s problem is that in this case, Trump is correct, as McKinley was renamed by President Barack Obama by fiat in 2015. Obama himself announced the name change during a visit summer to Alaska that year. This was part of his governing via pen and phone initiative as he was pandering to every Native American entity at the expense of the interests of anyone who was not Native.
The problem with the renaming by Obama is that the name McKinley was set into stone during ANILCA (Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act) in 1980. It was a compromise when the smallish park surrounding the mountain was expanded to the current Denali National Park and Preserve.
Congress, including Senators Ted Stevens, Frank Murkowski, and Congressman Don Young hammered out a compromise that retained the name of the mountain as McKinley. President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation Dec 1980, one month before Ronald Reagan took office.
If Congress sets the name for this particular rock, it is up to Congress to change it. If the delegation offers a simple piece of legislation to rename it once again and gets it through Congress either as stand-alone legislation or as an amendment, I expect Trump will sign it.
This is not the first time Trump brought up renaming McKinley, as he reportedly asked the delegation (Lisa Murkowski, Dan Sullivan and Don Young) in 2016 if he should rename it. They said no, and he dropped it for that term in office.
This is where returning fire against dirty players comes in.
Lisa has been out there throwing rhetorical (and other) elbows at Trump ever since the release of the Billy Bush tape intended to take him out of the presidential race Oct 2016. Her latest foray after the election was to demand FBI background checks for all Trump nominees, while ignoring the FBI’s devolution into a partisan secret police force. Her comments in December about leaving the Republican party didn’t help either.
It is not a surprise that Lisa was not prominently mentioned in relation to Trump’s EO reversing Biden’s closure of Alaska to mining, oil and natural gas. It is unknown at this time how much she participated, leaving one to wonder that if she is allowing personal animus against Trump to get in the way of her job of furthering the interests of Alaska in Congress. If so, why pray tell is she in DC?
Renaming McKinley was a sharp elbow in the chest, return fire from someone Lisa has been tossing elbows at for the last 8 years.
Keep this up, Lisa, and the next one will be in the chops.
Alex Gimarc lives in Anchorage since retiring from the military in 1997. His interests include science and technology, environment, energy, economics, military affairs, fishing and disabilities policies. His weekly column “Interesting Items” is a summary of news stories with substantive Alaska-themed topics. He was a small business owner and Information Technology professional.
