Josh First's Blog

Property rights, anyone? Republicans? Hello?

My fellow Republicans have just passed a two-sentence law that single-handedly strips away private property rights from private landowners in Pennsylvania, and Governor Tom Corbett is weighing whether or not to sign it.

To wit: If you signed an oil and gas lease that is still in force, and it is silent on being unitized with some other gas drilling unit miles away, why then, the gas company can put you in that unit, begin paying you some paltry sum, and your lease never ends. The gas company can come back for your gas decades later. You are completely stuck and do not have the opportunity to renegotiate better terms for a new lease.

Never mind that the same “Republicans” who propagated this anti-American Communist plot are also the same ones who were championing forced pooling, too.

Some of these jokers are in the administration, so more on them later, on an as-needed basis. Keep in mind that some of these guys, and one person comes to my mind immediately, have never made a dollar in the private sector. Rather, their entire Republican careers have been spent on the taxpayer dole, in some public role or another. And here they have the cajones to try to strip private landowners of their private property rights.

Many voters know me as an American political activist first, and a Republican last. This recent vote in both the PA House and PA Senate reconfirms for me that my beliefs best lie with the more independent-minded, and not with the partisans. It is a sad fact that Democrats are for forced pooling, too, and also believe that private property rights are best managed by government or its corporate buddies.

But that is not my fight. I am a conservative and a Republican, and by God, when I see something that stinks this bad, I am calling it what it is: Crap.

The Republican Party ought to be made of better people who know better. For shame.