Rural Utah Communities Join Fight to Protect Western Way of Life
April 30, 2018 – DENVER,
CO. Three rural, isolated, and federal land dominated Utah counties
that suffered economic privation from illegal national monument decrees
today sought to join in lawsuits filed by powerful environmental groups
against President Trump. Kane, Garfield, and San Juan Counties, located
across the vast south-east corner of the Beehive State, represented by
Mountain States Legal Foundation, argue President Trump has the legal
authority and moral obligation to reduce the size of two national
monuments in Utah illegally declared by Presidents Bill Clinton and
Barack Obama.
When President Clinton ordered the Grand
Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996, closing off 1.9 million
acres of public land to the productive uses that have traditionally
supported western communities, residents were promised the resulting
tourism boom would more than make up for the loss of ranching, mining,
logging, and other economic activities. The tourists, however, never
came and local economies never recovered. When President Trump, based
upon recommendations by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke after a
thorough study, announced late last year that he was reducing the size
of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and the Bears Ears
National Monument (an eleventh-hour decree issued by President Obama in
2016), the action was immediately challenged by radical environmental
groups and the billion-dollar corporation Patagonia. The groups, all
totaled, raised $390 million for the latest year available and bragged
of assets of more than $855 million.
“Presidents—no matter how exalted by the
media—are not pharaohs; nothing is written in stone—even our beloved
Constitution can be amended; and, all illegal acts are meant to be
rectified,” said William Perry Pendley, Mountain States Legal Foundation
president.
“A President has the legal authority and a
moral obligation to ensure that actions by the Executive comply with the
Constitution and laws passed by Congress,” said David McDonald,
Mountain States Legal Foundation staff attorney. “President Trump
walked back illegal and economically destructive actions by his
predecessors and it’s vital the people whose livelihoods are on the
line—not just well-to-do environmentalists who occasionally camp in the
area—have the right to defend his actions.”
The President of the United States has been
delegated the authority under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate
as national monuments “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric
structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” on
federal lands.” The Act also mandates that the designations “shall be
confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and
management of the objects to be protected.”
The Act was passed to provide “protection
to the large Indian ruins of the southwest.” Its legislative history
proves that Congress was concerned singularly with “the preservation of
the remains of the historic past[,]” and that its entire and sole
purpose was in order “to create small reservations reserving only so
much land as may be absolutely necessary for the preservation of these
interesting relics of prehistoric times.” Congress “specifically
rejected broader versions of the law that included protection of scenic
areas within the Act.”
Unfortunately, however, presidents of both
parties have long abused this power by designating huge swaths of
federal land as national monuments on only the thinnest of
justifications—as was the case with the 1.9-million-acre Grand
Staircase-Escalante and 1.35-million-acre Bears Ears designations.
In 1997, Mountain States Legal Foundation
filed a lawsuit challenging the creation of the vast Grand Staircase
Escalante National Monument and in 2017 urged President Trump to revoke
the decrees issued by Clinton and Obama.
Mountain States Legal Foundation, created
in 1977, is a nonprofit, public interest law firm dedicated to
individual liberty, the right to own and use property, limited and
ethical government, and the free enterprise system. Its offices are in
suburban Denver, Colorado.
For more information: Wilderness Society v. Trump
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