{"id":3989,"date":"2017-10-10T22:03:01","date_gmt":"2017-10-11T05:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sbbch.org\/?p=3989"},"modified":"2025-04-26T16:31:24","modified_gmt":"2025-04-26T22:31:24","slug":"house-committee-to-consider-antiquities-act-overhaul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sbbch.org\/?p=3989","title":{"rendered":"House committee to consider Antiquities Act overhaul"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

BY\u00a0DEVIN HENRY<\/a>\u00a0–\u00a010\/09\/17 04:41 PM EDT<\/span><\/p>\n

A House committee on Wednesday will mark up a bill to overhaul the\u00a0Antiquities Act, a law that gives the president power to establish national monuments for preservation.<\/p>\n

The bill, introduced Friday by House Natural Resources Chairman\u00a0Rob Bishop<\/a><\/span>\u00a0(R-Utah) would put new rules on large national monument designations made by presidents.\u00a0Antiquities Act reform is\u00a0a key priority for some conservatives, interest groups and Westerners.<\/p>\n

The bill would maintain the president\u2019s power to declare national monuments, but any monument larger than 640 acres would be required to go through a federal environmental review process.<\/p>\n

The legislation\u00a0applies increasingly strict rules to potential monuments the larger\u00a0they get, ultimately requiring county and state governments to sign off on the monument designation before it takes effect.<\/p>\n

It\u00a0also codifies the president\u2019s ability to reduce the size of a monument. The Natural Resources Committee will mark up the bill on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Bishop, a frequent critic of presidential monument designations under the Antiquities Act, said his bill would fix a law that has a \u201cworthy goal” that “has been manipulated for ulterior political purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cToday the act is too often used as an excuse for presidents to unilaterally lock up vast tracts of public land without any mechanism for people to provide input or voice concerns. This is wrong,\u201d he said in a statement.<\/p>\n

He said his bill \u201cmodernizes the law to restore its intent, allowing for the protection of actual antiquities without disenfranchisement of local voices and perspectives. It standardizes and limits the president\u2019s power to reshape monuments.\u201d<\/p>\n

The legislation comes as the Interior Department\u00a0recommends President Trump shrink<\/a>\u00a0a handful of large monument designations made since the 1990s.<\/p>\n

That\u00a0proposal is highly controversial among conservationists who have opposed efforts to shrink monuments and will likely sue to test the legality of such decisions.<\/p>\n

Energy industry groups, ranchers and other interests have encouraged the review and Antiquities Act reform on the grounds that monument designations set\u00a0large tracts of land, especially in the West, for conservation rather than use.<\/p>\n

The Natural Resources Committee on Wednesday will also consider ranking Democrat Ra\u00fal Grijalva\u2019s (Ariz.) resolution requiring Interior Secretary\u00a0Ryan Zinke<\/a><\/span>\u00a0share with Congress more information related to his national monuments review.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Trump administration, urged on by well-funded ideologues and fossil fuel interests, is engaged in an unprecedented effort to destroy our country\u2019s system of public lands,\u201d Grijalva wrote in an\u00a0op-ed in The Hill<\/a>\u00a0last week.\u00a0\u201cThis effort is not about our shared national interest, and if left unchecked it will eventually reach your backyard.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Congress Aims Killing Blow at Public Lands<\/h1>\n

The Wilderness Society<\/a><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
\n
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Rep. Rob Bishop is moving legislation that would radically cut down the scope of the Antiquities Act, effectively blocking new protections of\u00a0national monument lands<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Bishop’s bill\u2014in an Orwellian flourish, titled the “National Monument Creation and Protection Act”\u2014would bar the Antiquities Act from being used to protect landmarks, prehistoric structures and objects of “scientific interest,” switching the law’s scope to the vague term “object or objects of antiquity.”<\/p>\n

Court rulings and more than a century of presidential practice have established that the Antiquities Act is broad and can protect large natural landscapes. Reducing its scope to the narrow yet vague and infinitely litigable terms Bishop proposes would fulfill a longstanding goal of the anti-public lands fringe and severely undermine the law.<\/p>\n

Among other things, Bishop is infamous for remarking about Native American rock art at Nevada’s Basin and Range National Monument, “Ah, bullcrap. That’s not an antiquity<\/a>.” It’s not hard to see the potential damage done by reshaping a bedrock conservation law in this man’s image. If thousand-year-old art\u2014not to mention the Grand Canyon itself, whose onetime monument status led to a legal ruling that the Antiquities Act could be applied to large natural landscapes\u2014isn’t an “antiquity,” then what would he deem worth saving?<\/p>\n

Bishop’s bill would also outlaw monuments beyond a certain acreage, allow future presidents to slash existing monuments down to a fraction of their size, and completely end the practice of setting aside marine habitat under monument status.<\/p>\n

“On the heels of [Interior] Secretary [Ryan] Zinke’s\u00a0secret report<\/a>\u00a0to illegally roll back national monument protections across the country, [House Natural Resources Committee] Chairman Bishop has one-upped him by trying once again to gut the law that protected these treasures in the first place,” said Dan Hartinger, deputy director for parks & public lands defense at\u00a0The Wilderness Society<\/a>. “It seems as though they’re in some perverse contest to see who can author the most radical proposal to sell out our public lands to development.”<\/p>\n

Antiquities Act Has Been a Long-Running, Bipartisan Success<\/strong><\/p>\n

Signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, the Antiquities Act authorizes presidents to protect important archaeological, historic and scientific resources on\u00a0public lands<\/a>\u00a0under the designation “national monument.” It has been used on a bipartisan basis by almost every president, a method\u00a0supported by some 90 percent of voters<\/a>\u00a0that forms the backbone of our National Park System.<\/p>\n

Despite its popularity and proven track record, in the spring of 2017, President Trump\u00a0signed an executive order<\/a>\u00a0launching a “review” of every large national monument established under the Antiquities Act since the beginning of 1996. It was a move transparently spurred by extreme members of Congress trying to shrink boundaries and reduce protections in their respective states.<\/p>\n

In September, media outlets\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke’s recommendations based on that review featured changes to 10 national monument lands, including shrinking Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, Nevada’s Gold Butte and Oregon’s Cascade-Siskiyou.<\/p>\n

Bishop’s law is the natural next step, a killing blow aimed at the very foundation of the American public lands tradition. The goal is to not only roll back what has been protected in the past, but to prevent any and all protections in the future.<\/p>\n

We don’t know precisely what path this bill will take, but should it come to a full House vote, we will call on Wilderness Society supporters to mobilize and let their members of Congress know Bishop’s proposal is totally unacceptable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY\u00a0DEVIN HENRY\u00a0–\u00a010\/09\/17 04:41 PM EDT A House committee on Wednesday will mark up a bill to overhaul the\u00a0Antiquities Act, a law that gives the president power to establish national monuments for preservation. The bill, introduced Friday by House Natural Resources Chairman\u00a0Rob Bishop\u00a0(R-Utah) would put new rules on large national monument designations made by presidents.\u00a0Antiquities Act […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbbch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbbch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbbch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbbch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbbch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3989"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sbbch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3994,"href":"https:\/\/sbbch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989\/revisions\/3994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sbbch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbbch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sbbch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}