The president should ignore Ryan Zinke’s recommendations and revoke illegally designated or expanded national monuments.
by William Perry Pendley
Like a rookie agent in a spy thriller, Secretary of the Interior
Ryan Zinke went rogue in responding to President Trump’s executive order
to review and make recommendations regarding the legality of two
decades of national-monument decrees whereby past presidents, pursuant
to the unilateral authority granted them by the Antiquities Act of 1906,
designated federal lands as “national monuments” and, like national
parks and wilderness areas, put them largely off limits to economic and
recreational uses.
Instead of doing as asked, Secretary Zinke recommended decreasing the
size of only four of the most blatantly illegal national monuments while
leaving the boundaries of all the others standing with mollycoddle
language, which will soon get stricken by environmentalists. Worse, he
asked that the president do as Clinton and Obama did before him: that
is, designate as national monuments federal lands that do not qualify
under the Antiquities Act, including, in a surprisingly questionable
case of special pleading, one in his home state of Montana. If President
Trump does not heed his own pugnacious and not Zinke’s pusillanimous
counsel, the matter will be up to the entity entrusted by the
Constitution with management of federal lands: Congress. That is as it
should be, but whether Congress is up to the task is doubtful, given not
just the past nine months but the last 107 years.
...Obama ignored unanimous state and local opposition in Maine and
used the Act to designate 87,654 acres purchased for the National Park
Service (NPS) as a “seed” for the NPS’s 1988 plan for a 3.2 million–acre
park, contrary to a 1998 federal law requiring that Congress authorize
all new park-suitability studies. Finally, in a belated Christmas gift
to Leonardo DiCaprio and other environmental extremists, Obama thumbed
his nose at Utahans with his 1.35 million–acre Bears Ears National
Monument in San Juan County. That is not all. Elsewhere, as New Mexican
and Reagan-administration alumnus Frank DuBois observes, the Obama
administration, instead of designating the “smallest area” possible
around “the objects to be protected,” drew a boundary that replicated,
for example, a series of wilderness areas Congress refused to designate,
and then populated it with purportedly qualifying objects.
...Sadly, after setting forth the abuses to which the Act has been put
over the decades, and cognizant — not only as the secretary of the
interior but also as the representative for all of Montana in the U.S.
House — of the vast changes in federal land law since 1906, he failed to
recognize that the Antiquities Act long ago outlived its usefulness
even while it remains capable of massive and malevolent misapplication.
Incredibly, instead of calling for its repeal, he recommends its use for
a Union Army camp in Kentucky, civil-rights sites throughout the South,
and a portion of a multiple-use national forest in his backyard in
Montana where an American Indian tribe seeks to prevent the owner of an
oil and gas lease issued by the Reagan administration from drilling on
his property...
President Trump should reject Secretary Zinke’s recommendations;
order preparation of new proclamations to revoke illegally designated or
expanded monuments, to shrink them to legal size, or to provide them
with bullet-proof language that preserves local economic and
recreational use; and ask Congress to repeal the Antiquities Act to end
forever the threat of mischief against rural communities...
3 comments:
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มาพร้อมด้วย ป๊อกเด้ง บาคาร่า น้ำเต้าปูปลา และเกมอื่น ๆ อีกมากมาย สมัครสมาชิกฟรี
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สมัครง่าย โปรโมชั่นอีกเพียบ คอบลห้ามพลาด พนันบอล
ทำรายการด้วยระบบออโต้ บริการ24ชม
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