A 'constitutional' sheriff's fiefdom: COVID amok, guns aplenty, and hunting cougars with hounds
Like many so-called “constitutional” sheriffs, Bob Songer defiantly rules Washington State’s rural Klickitat County like a personal fiefdom, deferring to no other governing body and accountable to no one. Not only did Songer adamantly refuse to enforce Gov. Jay Inslee’s COVID-19 masking and other health restrictions—when he recently came down with the illness himself, he returned to work at his office in a matter of days, boasting that he had recovered without ever taking a vaccine.
And while Klickitat—located just east of Vancouver, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, on the northern side of the Columbia River—is a lightly populated county with just over 20,000 residents, Songer’s impact as a rogue sheriff has proven to be far-reaching, particularly as a result of perhaps his most notorious activity: hunting down and eradicating mountain lions in his county using posses with hound packs, a practice banned by the state in 1996 and a law Songer claims sheriffs like himself are exempt from. Local residents are instructed to call his office about cougar sightings before they reach out to state game wardens, whose participation he ignores.
State wildlife officials, however, have neither confronted Songer about his thinly disguised cougar-extermination operations nor contravened him in any way. Instead, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s (WDFW) most recent cougar policies seemingly opened the door for other sheriffs around the state to resume hunting cougars with hound packs, after the state wildlife commission green-lighted the training of people to hunt with that method.
A LAW UNTO HIMSELF
Songer, as the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights (IREHR) explored earlier this year, has over the past couple of years aligned his law enforcement operation with the radical right across several fronts, including anti-vaccination causes, particularly through Ammon Bundy’s theocratic “People’s Rights” network. Songer also promoted last summer’s hoax rumors claiming that “antifa arsonists” were secretly responsible for the wildfires that swept the West Coast.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/8/20/2047181/-A-constitutional-sheriff-s-fiefdom-COVID-amok-guns-aplenty-and-hunting-cougars-with-hounds