Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Lauren Boebert walk into a bar and start brawling. A drunk cries “wolf.” The politicians regroup like a unified team with a common enemy.

Minus the bar, this is no joke. Boebert’s most recent House victory squarely aligns her with Obama and Biden on wolves. Maybe the three are guided by science, at least regarding this conflict, more than emotional urban politics.

Nothing better illustrates Colorado’s urban-rural balkanization than Front Range voters unleashing gray wolves on the Western Slope, where they will prey on pets, livestock, elk and other desirable wildlife.

Unless that is, Rep. Lauren Boebert gets in their way. A right-leaning Republican from Silt, Boebert wants to reenact a policy directive of former left-leaning President Barack Obama, enacted by former right-leaning President Donald Trump and supported by left-leaning President Joe Biden.

The relevance of this odd political alignment dates to 2020, when Colorado voters narrowly passed Proposition 114. It forced the state to reintroduce wolves west of the Continental Divide. Rural Western Slope residents trounced the measure, but it passed with heavy support in the Front Range metropolitan areas of Boulder and Denver.

Stay up to speed: Sign-up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

By command of Prop 114, the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Commission must reintroduce and manage gray wolves by Dec. 31 of this year.

Because gray wolves are on the federal government’s Endangered Species List, state agents and individuals could face charges for killing them to protect pets, wildlife or livestock. In the near term, the federal government will designate Colorado’s anticipated wolves as a nonessential experimental population with limited protection.

Boebert introduced and led full House passage this month of an amendment to the 2024 Interior Appropriations Bill that would delist gray wolves, permanently lifting restrictions on killing or otherwise managing them.

The “Trust the Science Act,” as Boebert titled the amendment, would reinstate a 2020 Fish and Wildlife rule that removed gray wolves from the Endangered Species List. Though no fan of Boebert, President Joe Biden has fought to maintain the delisting.

“We can no longer put farmers and ranchers in harm’s way by using taxpayer dollars to protect a species that has been fully recovered and that is destroying their livestock,” Boebert said in a written statement. “It is time for the federal government (judicial branch) to get out of the way and allow state and tribal wildlife agencies to manage this species.”

When the Fish and Wildlife Service delisted wolves, the agency knew of nearly 7,000 in the lower 48 states.

“The gray wolf has been the latest Endangered Species Act success story with significant population recoveries in the Rocky Mountains and western Great Lakes regions,” Boebert explained.

The relisting upholds the will of neither Congress nor the president. It was ordered last year by one federal judge in the U.S. District of Northern California, who questioned the Fish and Wildlife agency’s science after the far-left organizations Earthjustice and the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit on behalf of wolves.

Wolves were included in the Endangered Species Act 55 years ago. In 2009, then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced plans for the delisting that Trump carried out.

Salazar was eminently qualified to address the issue, as a Western Slope native who had served as Colorado’s Democratic state’s attorney general and senator before accepting Obama’s appointment. Obama supported delisting, Salazar said, because “scientists have concluded that recovery has occurred.”

The Endangered Species Act is sacred. Listing non-endangered animals erodes the list’s credibility like a boy crying wolf. When Obama, Biden and Boebert agree – an occasion that could signal the end of time – we should probably “trust the science.”

Denver Gazette Editorial Board