WASHINGTON — President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday calling into question the future of more than two dozen national monuments proclaimed by the last three presidents to set aside millions of acres from development.
In asking Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke for an unprecedented review of national monuments, Trump may force a question never before tested in the 111-year history of the Antiquities Act: Whether one president can nullify a previous president’s proclamation establishing a national monument.
Signing the executive order at the Department of the Interior Wednesday, Trump called President Barack Obama’s creation of national monuments an “egregious abuse use of power.”
“And it’s gotten worse and worse and worse, and now we’re going to free it up,” he said. “This should never have happened.”
Trump’s executive order takes aim at 21 years of proclamations beginning in 1996. That time frame encompasses the “bookends” of two of the most controversial national monument designations in recent history: President Clinton’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996 to President Obama’s Bears Ears National Monument in 2016. Both are in Utah, and faced opposition from the congressional […]
Stephan–having just made a trip to visit the Bear’s Ears area with my wife, and having visited the Grand Staircase last year, I recognize they are worth preserving. But you fail to recognize that there are two sides to this, and that they each have legitimacy. Utah’s complaint is that, without fairly taking the state’s interests into account, two presidents in the past 20 years have permanently placed under the highest restriction 3,230,000 acres of Utah’s land space. This is an area that is half the size of Massachusetts and equivalent to the size of Connecticut. If you then consider the five national parks and numerous national monuments that Utah already has, you begin to see why Utah might object to having yet another 1.35 million acre chunk carved out of its hide by presidential fiat. And, having traveled around the majority of the Bear’s Ear monument, it is both my wife’s and my feeling that it is considerable larger than it needs to be. Yes, there is a lot there to protect. But vast swaths of it are juniper and sagebrush flat lands that do not have significant archaeological sites, but do have value for purposes (such as grazing) for which they have been used for more than a century but which presumably now, under the standard rules of national monument status will no longer be allowed. I sympathize with preservation, and am a bit annoyed with some of what my governor and congressional representatives have argued. But I also think Utah is being picked on. No state east or west of here (except maybe Nevada, where I grew up, and which is stuck like Utah) would put up with that massive an action without putting up a fight. Indeed, no East Coast or mid-west state has any significant federally-owned territory within its borders, and you can be sure that they would scream loudly if a president did to them what was done to Utah.