Let me be clear about what I am not saying.
I am not saying that bears are coordinating. I am not saying they have identified a procedural vulnerability in federal rulemaking and are exploiting it with a discipline that would embarrass most trade associations. I am not saying any of that, because I would like to continue being invited to things.
What I am saying is that the docket has been open since March, and that I have read the notices, and that they are the strangest documents to come out of the Fish and Wildlife Service in my career.
The boring part is the important part
Rulemaking is designed to be tedious. That is not a flaw. The comment period exists so that a rule cannot be finalized in the dark, and the reopening requirement exists so an agency cannot run out the clock by letting the intake system fail at a convenient moment.
It is a rule written to stop an agency from cheating. Nobody drafting it in 1946 spent much time worrying about the other direction.
The safeguard is working exactly as written. That is the part I cannot get comfortable with.
Every extension has been lawful. Every notice has been properly filed. If you read the docket without reading the news, you would conclude that a federal agency has had extraordinarily bad luck with its data centers, and that it has handled that luck with scrupulous procedural care.
What I keep coming back to
My colleagues in the newsroom have started sending me the wildlife coverage. I have started reading it, which I regard as a personal failure.
Here is where I have landed, and I want to state it plainly so it can be held against me later.
I do not think the bears know what a docket is. I think that is probably the least interesting question available, and I think we keep asking it because the alternative questions are worse. The useful question is not whether an outcome was intended. It is whether a system produced it, repeatedly, on schedule, in a direction that benefits one party.
We have a word for that when a corporation does it. We call it a strategy, and we do not require proof that anyone in the building understood the statute.
The easement is still in place. The docket is still open. It is scheduled to close on September 25.
I would not schedule anything important for that week.