Friday in Washington is blithely referred to as “Take Out The Trash Day,” as it’s the traditional day of the week when our government issues press releases and concludes business in matters that they’d prefer didn’t get a whole lot of media attention. Today, Representative Richard Pombo (R-CA), Chairman of the House Resources Committee, included a piece of garbage especially for the District.

In the Draft Reconciliation Bill, published today, Pombo and his panel have, under Subtitle C, Sections 6306-6308 of the bill, drafted language that would require the Secretary of the Interior to sell off fifteen parcels in the National Park System for the “purposes of commercial and residential development.” While most of the parcels are in far-flung Alaska, one of them — identified in Section 6307 — is much closer to home: Theodore Roosevelt Island Park.

The ninety-acre park, which sits off the Virginia side of the Potomac River, adjacent to the George Washington Memorial Parkway, is a wooded enclave frequented by weekend walkers who enjoy its trails and bucolic surroundings. In the middle of the island is a large granite area that serves as a monument to Theodore Roosevelt. Considering the sale and development of a park dedicated to honoring one of this nation’s foremost environmentalists would raise proceeds intended to directly offset, among other things, the cost of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, this bill is yet another one of those beautifully ironic pieces of legislation — only this one moves past simply naming a bill after something the bill does the opposite of and graduates to a new level where legislators actively stick it to dead people. DCist is mildly happy, though, that they also didn’t try and rename the island after Ronald Reagan.

Obviously, this Draft Reconciliation Bill just moved out of the Panel, so it has a ways to go before it’s enacted. So if you’d prefer the District’s Roosevelt Island not end up looking like New York City’s Roosevelt Island, the time to act is now.