By BLM we don’t mean Black Lives Matter. Instead, we mean the Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency which hasn’t just gone off the rails and become abusive of its power but is now actively seeking to destroy the U.S. economy.

We’re not kidding about this. Here’s just how off-the-rails these people have become…

The Biden administration on Thursday finalized a new rule for public land management that’s meant to put conservation on more equal footing with oil drilling, grazing and other extractive industries on vast government-owned properties.

Officials pushed past strong opposition from private industry and Republican governors to adopt the proposal. GOP members of Congress said in response that they will seek to invalidate it.

The rule from the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management — which oversees more than 380,000 square miles (990,000 square kilometers) of land, primarily in the U.S. West — will allow public property to be leased for restoration in the same way that oil companies lease land for drilling.

The rule also promotes the designation of more “areas of critical environmental concern” — a special status that can restrict development. It’s given to land with historic or cultural significance or that’s important for wildlife conservation.

The land bureau has a history of industry-friendly policies and for more than a century has sold grazing permits and oil and gas leases. In addition to its surface land holdings, the bureau regulates publicly-owned underground mineral reserves — such as coal for power plants and lithium for renewable energy — across more than 1 million square miles (2.5 million square kilometers).

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said the changes would “restore balance” to how the U.S. government manages its public lands. The new rule continues the administration’s efforts to use science to restore habitats and guide “strategic and responsible development,” Haaland said in a statement.

Deb Haaland is a liar, and that isn’t at all what this administration is doing. They’re going after all the extractive industries – timber, mining, oil and gas, even agriculture. This is going to affect ranchers who graze cattle on federal lands. It’ll affect campers. It’ll affect practically everybody.

The mining industry is already under pressure from China and other competitors who can undercut our producers using slave labor – and in the case of the Chinese competitors and their projects in Africa, it’s very often child slave labor. Now our miners won’t be able to lease federal lands at all. That will put us in an even more disadvantaged position vis-a-vis China, just at a time when Biden’s EPA is now doubling down on its EV mandates and emissions standards and making minerals like lithium even more of a necessity.

We’re not outright accusing Joe Biden of treason. But what we will say is that if the millions of dollars in Chinese bribes that Biden and his family took carried the strings of obligating him to make policy that would enrich Chinese Communist Party organs, we don’t know how that would look any different than this.

Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, a staunch Biden critic, on Thursday said he will introduce legislation to repeal the public lands rule. The Republican lawmaker alleged it would block access to areas that people in Wyoming depend on for mineral production, grazing and recreation.

“President Biden is allowing federal bureaucrats to destroy our way of life,” he said.

Louisiana, thankfully, doesn’t have all that much federal land. We’re not in the same situation that Barrasso’s Wyoming and other Western states are. Nevertheless, BLM is the agency which does a lot of the permitting for offshore oil in the Gulf, and under Biden that’s dried up to nearly nothing. For example, Louisiana’s federal offshore rig count stands at 15, which is close to the modern low of 11.

They’ve all but destroyed the offshore oil industry. And now they want to do the same for mining, ranching, timber and the other industries.

The stupid thing about this is that by keeping the timber industry from operating in these federal areas the Interior Department is likely dooming a good deal of that timberland anyway, because they don’t manage those forests well at all. For fear of “damaging” the environment they don’t clear underbrush, and because of that those forests become tinderboxes which produce giant wildfires that the Left then blames on “climate change.”

And the very trees and arboreal wildlife they claim they want to protect are lost anyway.

Bear in mind the context of this, which is that Biden’s handlers are busy weighing in whether to declare a “climate emergency” later this year before the election. This would seem to be a piece of whatever the “climate emergency” remedy would be, though it might be the most benign part of whatever that would entail.

Congress can’t fix this. The House will try, and perhaps Barrasso can round up the 49 Republican senators and a couple more from the Democrat side, like for example the endangered Jon Tester from Montana and perhaps Joe Manchin, to make a majority for knocking this stupid and abusive executive action away.

But really, at this point it’s up to the states to fight this most effectively. Attorneys General like Louisiana’s Liz Murrill, who is quite capable of beating the federal government to a pulp for such abuses, should bring this into court immediately. But more than that, our legislators should begin working on ways to limit or even ban the Bureau of Land Management from operating in this state. Forbid state agencies from cooperating with it.

It’s time for states like Louisiana to begin protecting our people from the federal government. It is not engaged in safeguarding or promoting the interests of our people, and that puts it in the realm of tyranny. Short of secession or revolution, which we do not favor, steps must be taken to limit its damage.

It’s time to get to work.

Yes, we trust that should Donald Trump be re-elected and Biden sent back to senescence in Delaware, these abuses can be curtailed if not ended. But we’re past the point where we can count on good election results to safeguard the constitution. States are sovereign in our constitutional system and it’s time for the states to begin reclaiming that sovereignty.