Court declines to consider challenge to Clinton monuments

Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt praised the Supreme Court for refusing to consider a lawsuit challenging the creation of national monuments in five Western states.
The court reinforced the president's power to protect federal lands, Babbitt said Monday.
''I would suggest this is good news for future presidents,'' said Babbitt, who oversaw President Clinton's designation of 19 national monuments under the century-old Antiquities Act.
''This is a statement that the Antiquities Act continues in full force and will be available for future presidents to continue a centurylong tradition that has been extremely productive and helped shape our national park system and our system of refuges of all kinds,'' Babbitt said.
The Mountain States Legal Foundation of Denver, a conservative public interest law firm, said Clinton overstepped his authority in making the 2000 designations in Arizona, Colorado, Oregon and Washington state.
And Tulare County, Calif., argued that restrictions on timber harvesting as a result of the designation of a California monument have turned the forest into ''virtual tinder boxes'' that threaten safety and property.
Bush administration lawyer Theodore Olson said lawsuits against the president over the designation of national monuments are not allowed.
Last October, an appeals court dismissed Mountain States' challenge, saying it failed to spell out how the proclamations exceeded the authority that had been conveyed by Congress. The Supreme Court on Monday let the appellate ruling stand.
Attorneys for the groups challenging the monuments did not return phone messages.
The Antiquities Act gives presidents the power to protect land threatened by development. President Theodore Roosevelt was the first to use it to establish Devil's Tower in Wyoming as a national monument.
Since then, every president but Reagan and the two Bushes have used the power to create or expand a monument, establishing about 120 monuments spanning more than 70 million acres.
Clinton used the Antiquities Act to create 19 monuments and expand three others, protecting 5.9 million acres. State and local officials, ranchers, off-road vehicle users, oil and gas companies and others complained that his proclamations locked up too much land.
Babbitt said careful research went into decisions on boundaries. The Agua Fria National Monument in Arizona was cut almost in half because archaeologists said part of the area proposed for monument designation didn't warrant protection.
Jim Angell, the Earthjustice attorney who defended the monument designation, said that, in addition to reinforcing the appeals court decision supporting the president's authority to designate monuments, it put to rest an argument floated by the Bush administration that it had the power to shrink or eliminate monuments, as well as create them.
''Monuments have a strong public constituency and it would have been a pretty blatant affront to those constituencies to start shrinking or eliminating monuments,'' Angell said. ''This is the last nail in the coffin of that argument.''
The monuments that were the focus of the legal challenge are the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, the Ironwood Forest National Monument, and the Sonoran Desert National Monument in Arizona; the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in Colorado; the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Oregon; Giant Sequoia National Monument in California; and the Hanford Reach National Monument in Washington.
The Bureau of Land Management is in the process of planning how to manage the monuments. The lawsuits did not affect that work.
The cases are Mountain States Legal Foundation v. Bush, 02-1590, and Tulare County v. Bush, 02-1623.