In April, Trump directed Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to review the designation of 22 land national monuments. This month, Zinke recommended revising the boundaries of four monuments, including Nevada’s Gold Butte, which also was created during Obama’s last month in office.
The Zinke report did not specify how much land should be cut from Gold Butte, but its language on historic water rights suggests some 24 square miles would be cut from the roughly 460-square-mile monument.
Those opposed to the Zinke review overall argued passionately that their beloved monuments deserved protection based on their value as historic landmarks or prehistoric structures or for their scientific interest. But also, underlying their arguments was the sentiment that once the government creates an entity, it has a right to exist in perpetuity.
There’s a legal argument to that effect. A letter signed by 121 law professors cites the 1938 opinion of Attorney General Homer Cummings that said the Antiquities Act of 1906 does not authorize presidents to abolish national monuments “after they have been established.”
Todd Gaziano, executive director of the pro-property rights Pacific Legal Foundation, doesn’t buy that argument. “Now they’re saying that the same presidential pen that created (monuments) can’t be used in someone else’s hand,” he said.
Shrinking site not new
Be it noted, presidents have downsized national monuments before. President Dwight Eisenhower cut the Great Sand Dunes National Monument and President Harry Truman halved the Santa Rosa Island National Monument.
Zinke presented his decisions as representative of voter opinion. A Salt Lake Tribune poll found that 51 percent of Utahans deemed Bears Ears to be too big. The same poll found that a majority of Utahans opposed breaking up Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which Zinke has proposed reducing by about 46 percent. All of Utah’s elected officials in Washington supported Zinke’s recommendations.
In 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt declared Devils Tower in Wyoming to be the first national monument, he set aside 1,153 acres.
During a recent conference call, Zinke urged reporters to read the Antiquities Act — and its mandate for monuments to be “confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management.” That original thinking is gone. Since 1996, presidents have created 26 national monuments of more than 100,000 acres.
Zinke recommended Trump work with Congress — a tack that would avoid having the courts decide if a president’s “original” word on monuments is final.
“Constituencies emerge for every government program,” Gaziano observed, and they will fight change.
There’s another saying, popular in the Obama White House: Elections have consequences.