The last step of the process by which a territory enters into political maturity and becomes a state, recognized as the equal of every other state within the Union is called an enabling act [1], which sets the terms of a parity covenant between the new state and the rest of the United States. Some of the elements of this law are boilerplate, similar for every state, and some of them recognize specific concerns that a new state must address as well as certain promises of action by the federal government towards the state. Most of the time, these laws do not attract a great deal of interest at the time or afterwards. To be sure, the addition of new states is newsworthy, but the terms by which those states are admitted and the promises made for those states to bring them to a place of equality with existing states does not tend to attract a great deal of scrutiny or commentary in most circumstances. In some ways, this is easy to understand, since there are many laws that are passed and most of them do not draw attention to themselves, except where there is particular controversy involved.

There are some exceptions to the lack of controversy of most enabling acts. If we may compare this to the process of human maturity, this is not surprising. Most teenagers become adults without any particular sense of dread on the part of the adults who they become peers with, and there are usually at least some issues of mutual concern. A young person will be looking for aid to go to college or establish a profession by which they may become a responsible and well-respected adult, and parents may have certain concerns about areas of behavior, but for the most part these concerns can be dealt with gracefully on each side as a teenager becomes an adult and is held personally responsible for their decisions and also granted respect as an equal by other adults. At other times, though, the relationship between parents and children is such that the terms of their equality remain contentious long after a teenager has reached adulthood, where there are continued concerns either that the adult is unable or unwilling to take responsibility for their lives and manage them effectively or that parents are being overprotective long after the time for protection has ended.

The most contentious enabling act in American History was that of the Lecompton Constitution for Texas in 1857. This constitution had been set up fraudulently by pro-slavery border ruffians from Missouri who had crossed over the state line into Kansas to ensure that it would be admitted as a slave state, while the later and more permanent settlers of the area, from further free areas, met in Topeka and established a constitutional convention that sought to make Kansas a free state. President James Buchanan attempted to force the issue with a Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate and approve the fraudulent Lecompton Constitution, and was defeated by a coalition of Free Soilers, Whigs, Republicans, and Northern Democrats who were offended by the blatant political fraud. Within Kansas itself the situation became a violent guerrilla conflict involving murders, the destruction of property by bands of vigilantes, and the problem of “bleeding Kansas” eventually was a major factor in the beginning of the Civil War. As it happened, Kansas was admitted as a free state in 1861, after the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, and proved to be a secure base for securing Missouri for the Union thanks to the leadership of generals like Samuel Curtis [2].

There has long been a low-intensity simmering crisis in the West regarding enabling acts, though. Slightly over two years ago, around the time I returned to the United States and settled in Oregon, the state of Utah passed an act that set up a four-stage process to attempt to induce the United States to return federally owned land to state control as was promised a long time ago in the Utah Enabling Act of 1894, which set the terms by which Utah became a state in 1896. After more than a century of statehood, the federal government still owns almost two-thirds of the land in the state of Utah, and Utah wants a lot of that land back [3]. Utah has eschewed any sort of conflict to the point of denying access or using force, but has sought a four-step process of education, negotiation, legislation, and litigation in order to gain control of over thirty million acres of land in Utah that is still under the control of the Department of the Interior.

One of the less-known and longer-simmering crises of the United States is the immense disparity between land ownership between states and the federal government between eastern and western states. More than 50 percent of the land west of Kansas, for example, is under control of the federal government [4], and this has caused a lot of tension between western states that want to control their own resources and earn proceeds from the stewardship of their own land and mineral rights and a federal government that is disinclined to divest itself of control even of those responsibilities that it cannot handle efficiently or effectively. The fact that Utah believes that it can profit more than seventy million dollars a year by transferring that land to state control simply on economies of scale, apart from the proceeds of the sale of public land has given it the confidence to aggressively pursue its interests to negotiate, and if necessary sue the federal government to divest itself of western land as it promised to do in 1894 in granting Utah’s path to statehood.

At its base, the relationship between western states like Utah and the federal government concerning these lands is an example of a contentious and complicated path to adulthood where the consequences have taken a long time to play themselves out. The west has seen a large amount of federal infrastructure projects like dams that have allowed food to be grown on the high plateaus of the west and have also sought to use the west as the dumping place of undesirable nuclear waste and the site of intensely private bases, as well as a vast majority of the tribal lands of the United States. Besides the material differences and environmental differences and the complicated history of the development of the west, there are long-term concerns about the lack of respect of the people of the west from the east coast as well as the lack of trust that the government will act in the best interests of the people of the west, and these deeper resentments have made the relationship between Utah and the United States a very tense and awkward one. Here’s hoping that open communication and reasonable and fair-minded negotiation lead to a just result, and a reduction of tension and conflict. No one wants that sort of drama to go on and on, after all.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/puerto-ricos-road-to-statehood-a-constitutional-essay/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/civil-war-fantasy-roster-samuel-curtis/

[3] Utah to seize own land from government, challenge federal dominance of Western states : ‘Transfer of Public Lands Act’ demands Washington relinquish 31.2 million acres by Dec. 31″. Washington Times. 2014-12-03. Retrieved 2015-02-17.

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Transfer_of_Public_Lands_Act#mediaviewer/File:Map_of_all_U.S._Federal_Land.jpg