Don Baur was quoted in "GOP Faces Pitched Battle As It Looks to Revise ESA," an article published in Law360, regarding the challenges Republicans will face as they attempt to amend the Endangered Species Act.

The ESA was passed in 1973 and was last amended in 2004, when Congress exempted the U.S. Department of Defense from critical habitat designations in some cases. The act was more substantively amended in 1988, when requirements to monitor candidate and recovered species and to incorporate public notice and comment into recovery plans were added, among other things. There have been other unsuccessful attempts to alter the law, most of which failed by trying to achieve too much, said Don Baur.

"There have been serious efforts in the past, like the bill from the late 1990s [sponsored by former Republican Sens. Dirk Kempthorne and John Chafee]," Baur said. "That one got pretty close, but still couldn't get across the finish line because there was an effort to make sweeping changes, rather than fine-tune the statute. And that just doesn't work, politically."