Friday, November 25, 2016

Trump urged to abolish national monuments, including 2 in NM

A congressman from a bordering state is calling on President-elect Donald Trump to abolish national monuments created during the Obama and Clinton administrations, an idea that could threaten two newly created monuments in New Mexico. Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, head of the House National Resources Committee, is getting push-back from conservation groups and some in the New Mexico congressional delegation for his suggestion that Trump could take back monuments preserving public lands from California to Maine. Obama designated the Rio Grande del Norte National Monument in Taos County and the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument in southern New Mexico. Doing away with national monuments created by presidential proclamation under the 110-year-old Antiquities Act has never been done, but also has never been legally tested. The act was passed in 1906 during the Republican administration of President Theodore Roosevelt, an early leader in the conservation movement. “If any administration thinks they’re going to start divesting us of a hundred-year history of lands that belong to every American, they’re going to have to do it over my dead body,” said Sen. Martin Heinrich. Heinrich was joined in his condemnation of Bishop’s idea by New Mexico Democrats U.S. Sen. Tom Udall and U.S. Rep. Ben Ray Luján. But U.S. Rep. Steve Pearce, New Mexico’s only Republican member of Congress, pointed out this week that he had introduced legislation to protect 60,000 acres of the Organ Mountains, as opposed to the 496,000 acres Obama set aside. “The Antiquities Act requires that a President designate the smallest possible footprint in order to achieve the desired environmental preservation. American’s have witnessed the Obama Administration disregard that part of the law,” Pearce said in a written statement to the Journal. He called on Trump to review the Organ Mountains designation and others around the country, reducing their footprint “to an acreage supported by existing federal law.” He added, “Additionally, Congress should work with President Trump in the years to come on changing the designation process – so that no future President may unilaterally restrict lands from the people. These decisions must be made in Congress.”...more

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great idea.
Now don't forget to Save your private property rights too.
of us should use this momentum to amend/repeal sections of the Clean Water Act that takes ways , ponds, farm, ranch, roads maintenance, thereof, making your land less useful, less productive, less value or saleable.
New Mexicans and all American property owners are effected by this.
Abolishing WOTUS won't protect all of us as some have court rulings obliging property owners to abide by the CWA regardless of property rights and state law violations. So the CWA needs a partial rewrite at least.
Voice this to your politicians now.

Judy Keeler said...

We need to abolish all the special status land designations. They were all designed by the Nature Conservancy, working at the Washington DC level, to stop all productive uses of our western lands.... Wilderness Areas, Wilderness Study Areas, Areas of Critical Environmental Concerns, Resource Natural Areas, et.al., simply provide a tool for the self-serving, greedy elitists that want to rule over our nation. The one-world order thinkers... the "saviors" of our earth!!! Add to this the CWA, CAA, ESA and you have a tangles web of lies and deceit!!!

As Anonymous said, "don't forget to say our private property rights". This concept is what made our nation so great. What a novel idea!! An individual has the "right" to decide for himself/herself what is best for his economic sustainability - not the government....