|
Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes followed through on his promise to file a lawsuit over President Biden's decision to reinstate the boundaries of the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments. The lawsuit, filed in federal court Wednesday, claims the president violated the Antiquities Act of 1906 by reinstating the monuments. The Antiquities Act gives the president the authority to designate national monuments and has been used by both Republican and Democratic presidents.
“By filing a lawsuit against the federal government over these monuments, the State of Utah is wasting taxpayer money trying to undermine something that is evident to anyone who spends time in these remarkable landscapes—that Bears Ears and Grand Staircase deserve protection," Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Jennifer Rokala said in a statement. "Both legal and historical precedent support the creation of these landscape-scale monuments, and public opinion is with them as well.”
Utah no doubt hopes to send its case to the U.S. Supreme Court. But there is ample precedent for landscape-scale national monuments, in which the entire landscape is considered an “object of interest,” such as the Grand Canyon (protected in 1908 by President Theodore Roosevelt). The courts have in the past also refused to hear cases over landscape-scale monument designations, such as Jackson Hole National Monument (designated in 1943 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, now part of Grand Teton National Park), upholding the power of the president to designate landscape-scale monuments. Additionally, the Supreme Court has refused to hear cases regarding the legality of protecting natural, rather than solely man-made, objects using the Antiquities Act, further strengthening the president’s authority to create these monuments.
Finally, 60 percent of Utah voters said they supported the protection of the Bears Ears landscape as a national monument in Colorado College’s 2022 State of the Rockies poll.
|
Young people are resilient, and they can shake off things like that. But not children with asthma, and not elders with COPD, or any kind of pre-existing medical conditions. Those people tend to find themselves in the emergency room pretty fast.”
