When: October 11, 2017
Where: Committee on Natural Resources
Title: “Markup on Antiquities Act Reform”
What Happened: Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah) held a vote on his bill to fundamentally undermine the Antiquities Act, the law presidents have used since 1906 to designate national monuments when Congress fails to act. Bishop said in his opening statement that he wouldn’t mind doing away with the Antiquities Act altogether — a strange admission given the fact that presidentially designated monuments (like, say, the Grand Canyon) remain extraordinarily popular.
If you’re not familiar with the Antiquities Act, the New York Times has a great explanation of what it is and how it works. Basically, the law allows presidents to designate segments of federal property (both lands and waters) as national monuments to protect historically, scientifically and culturally significant landscapes and resources. Congress can declare any piece of federal property a national monument by passing a law; the point of the Antiquities Act is to give the president this power in cases where Congress doesn’t do this in a timely way (presidential designations don’t require congressional approval).
In addition to the Grand Canyon, Teddy Roosevelt used this authority to protect the Petrified Forest (now a national park), Pinnacles (now a national park), Mt. Olympus (now a national park), Lassen Peak (now a national park), Chaco Canyon (now a national historical park — you’re seeing a theme here), Devils Tower, Montezuma Castle and other iconic public lands. The Grand Canyon designation was upheld by the Supreme Court, which Republicans tend to forget when they complain that national monuments aren’t small enough. The point is not just that national monuments are a great addition to our nation’s conservation legacy, although they obviously are — the point is that many of our country’s most famous and well-loved natural places were protected through the Antiquities Act.
Regardless of their priceless contributions to our country, Republicans on the Committee often describe national monuments as an economically damaging “land grab.” Among other valuable insights, the Times explainer on the Antiquities Act shows how completely bogus these arguments really are:
The president can make national monuments only from land already controlled by the federal government, and the act generally does not change how the land is used, said Lisa Dale, the associate director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. If leases for mining, ranching, drilling or logging already exist on land to be made into a national monument, they can continue, but new leases probably won’t be allowed, she said.
To judge by their own rhetoric, that’s what Republican lawmakers really dislike about the Antiquities Act (and many public lands in general): the idea that some land might not be available for perpetual resource extraction. The underlying logic of this argument is that public lands have value only as long as they’re producing oil, gas, coal or other fossil fuels for commercial purposes. The economic benefits of tourism rarely factor into the equation — and forget any discussion of historic preservation for its own sake, as a cultural value that might outweigh oil industry demands.
We’ll get to the specifics of Rep. Bishop’s bill in a moment, but it needs to be understood that national monuments are widely supported — not just in the West, where Republicans falsely claim to speak for public opinion, but even by Midwestern Trump supporters. Despite years of Capitol Hill Republicans’ overheated “Drill, baby, drill” rhetoric and loud demands for weaker environmental laws, conservatives and liberals across the country agree that national monuments exist to protect our history and we should continue to support the system that makes them possible.
So, what did Chairman Bishop’s bill actually do? Here’s a useful rundown.
- Under H.R. 3990, no natural landscape or geographic object of scientific interest qualifies for designation. Only relics, artifacts, skeletal remains, fossils, and buildings are eligible for consideration.
- The bill also creates arbitrary and size-based requirements for new monuments, blocking areas within 50 miles of another monument and any areas over 85,000 acres from designation. Again, under these conditions, existing monuments like Utah’s Bears Ears, which contains 100,000 Native American archaeological sites and is home to large populations of mule deer, elk, and bighorn sheep, would be blocked from designation.
- Even existing national monuments are not safe from this anti-public lands bill, as it would give presidents the power to reduce any monument by 85,000 acres or less. This would put some of the best monuments for hunting and angling at risk, including Montana’s Upper Missouri River Breaks, Maine’s Katahdin Woods and Waters, and New Mexico’s Rio Grande del Norte and Organ Mountains Desert Peaks.
- Last, but not least, H.R. 3990 would block any marine areas from being designated as national monuments. Several marine monuments double as or contain national wildlife refuges, and all are important pieces of our public lands conservation system that provide breeding and feeding grounds to many game and endangered marine and avian species. This includes endangered species like the green turtle and the Hawaiian monk seal.
If all of this sounds like a “solution” in search of a problem to you, you’ll love Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva’s (D-Ariz.) opening statement at the markup, where he called the bill “a solution in search of a problem.”
Grijalva wasn’t the only one to object. A coalition made up of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, Patagonia and the outdoor gear company First Lite opposed the bill in a rare joint statement.
Rather than straightforwardly addressing why this bill might be a good idea (it isn’t), Republicans spent the hearing inventing national monuments horror stories to liven things up. Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) falsely claimed — you can see the video here — that he was never consulted on the establishment of Browns Canyon National Monument, which is in his district. It took about 30 seconds for people to realize what really happened — he just didn’t want to go to the public meeting:
Colorado 5th Congressional District Rep. Doug Lamborn was not able to attend the meeting, but he released a statement read by staff member Neal Schuerer, which was met by “boos.” In the statement Lamborn said he supports a bill going through Congress, having an opportunity for both sides to be heard, rather than a presidential executive order. He also said there is no consensus among Chaffee County voters when it comes to Browns Canyon.
Why did he say at the hearing that he was never consulted? It’s not clear. If you don’t like PDFs and happen to subscribe to The Mountain Mail, you can read the original story online.
We could go on, but you get the picture. This is their argument against the Antiquities Act and national monuments — the public opposes them (they don’t), they’re bad for the economy (they’re actually very good for the economy), and the national monument creation process is bad (it isn’t as long as you actually follow it, which the Trump administration doesn’t do).
The Antiquities Act fight heated up in 2017 when President Trump signed an illegal executive order shrinking two national monuments in Utah — Bears Ears, created by President Obama in 2016, and Grand Staircase-Escalante, created by President Clinton in 1996 — based on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s “review” of national monuments around the country of more than 100,000 acres. Zinke’s review was biased from the start — he never gave Native American tribes serious consideration — a direct assault on tribal sovereignty, leading to widespread criticism that his listening tour was a sham, and openly ignored public comments objecting to the proposal.
The entire episode became a major embarrassment for the Trump administration. Despite Republicans’ assurance that the cuts had nothing to do with mining interests, companies have already moved in to stake claims on formerly protected land. A federal judge ruled in September that because this giveaway was so egregious, plaintiffs challenging the cuts must be notified before any ground-disturbing activities occur anywhere within the legitimate, pre-Trump boundaries of the Utah monuments. The real land grab —the Zinke/GOP/mining land grab — is fortunately on hold. But future rulings or Republican acts of Congress could change that.
Unredacted documents released after Trump and Zinke made their cuts to the Utah monuments revealed that the administration ignored its own experts throughout the process and invented a story out of nowhere about needing to help ranchers, miners, drillers and loggers at the public’s expense:
They show Zinke’s team dismissed data from his own Bureau of Land Management staff showing that monument protections had safeguarded archeological treasures and boosted tourism. Zinke ignored science, economics and millions of public comments on his way to implementing the largest rollback of public lands protections in the nation’s history.
The internal documents confirm that the true motivation behind Trump and Zinke’s unrelenting attacks on public lands is to reward mining, logging, fossil-fuel and livestock interests.
We knew from previous internal emails that oil and gas exploration was behind their decision to shrink Bears Ears. Other documents show uranium mining interests were involved, too.
Yet, Zinke denied it, repeatedly claiming that mining and drilling had nothing to do with Trump’s orders to review national monuments and yank protections from them. He just wanted “everyone’s voice to be heard.”
Bishop’s bill fatally weakening the Antiquities Act was just one part of this larger, highly coordinated campaign to hand over public lands to private interests.
Republicans are opposing the Antiquities Act and fighting national monuments like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante as though the country’s future depended on it — and the public hasn’t benefited at all.
Unfortunately, shrinking treasured national monuments is just the tip of the iceberg. This push represents one piece of the broader Republican war on public lands, whose goal is to open up as much publicly protected land for development as possible to keep the oil and gas industry happy. This larger campaign takes on many forms: deregulating industry, transferring public lands to states, selling off public lands, reducing levels of protection (which is what we saw in Utah), changing the way public lands are managed . . . the list goes on.
Committee Republicans’ dislike of public lands runs so deep that they couldn’t even do the easy, popular thing and reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund before it expired on September 30, 2018. The Land and Water Conservation Fund, which helps fund federal, state and local conservation projects, is now in limbo and not receiving new money (which comes from the oil and gas industry, not from taxpayers) despite the fact that it’s one of the country’s most popular government programs of any kind.
If we weren’t wasting our time trying to wreck the Antiquities Act, what should we have been doing? There was no shortage of real environmental news that week.
On Oct. 9 came news that there’s enough wind energy over the oceans to power human civilization. The long and short of it is that oceans offer an unbelievably enormous amount of potential wind energy — companies just have to find a way to harness it. Rather than covering the ocean surface with turbines, experts at the Carnegie Institution for Science found that floating wind farms or more modest methods of capturing wind energy were more likely to work at the required scale. Amazingly, the study concludes that the “wind power available in the North Atlantic could be sufficient to power the world.” Did we hold a hearing on those findings and their natural resources implications? We did not.
On Oct. 11 we got less exciting news — an ‘enormous channel’ was in the process of being carved into the western side of the Dotson ice shelf, an important section of West Antarctica. The findings suggest that warm ocean water is now reaching vulnerable ice shelves from below, the same reason so many glaciers are rapidly disappearing. The study revealed that about 45 feet of ice thickness is lost annually, and the loss may be irrecoverable. Needless to say, Republicans wanted nothing to do with the climate change implications of this data.
On Oct. 10, the day before the markup, Ranking Member Grijalva called for stronger environmental and worker safety protections in the offshore drilling industry ahead of a separate Republican hearing on a bill to — you guessed it — weaken those rules. The bill would result in a giveaway of more than $9 billion in taxpayer dollars to four coastal states, allow the Secretary of the Interior to hold oil and gas lease sales off any part of the U.S. coastline at any time, eliminate the president’s ability to create marine national monuments, and repeal an Arctic drilling safety rule that incorporates lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon and Shell’s two failed drilling attempts in the Arctic Ocean.
On Oct. 11, the day of the hearing, Ranking Member Grijalva called Secretary Zinke out for passing off his support for Confederate monuments as somehow deferential to Native Americans: “If Secretary Zinke thinks monuments to slave-owning Confederate generals are important to Native American culture, he’s just as out of touch as the president. Books, museums and oral histories educate people. Statues glorify individuals, including many who never deserved the honor. If Secretary Zinke had actually spoken with tribal leaders, instead of just assuming he knows what they care about, he wouldn’t be trying to destroy Bears Ears National Monument — which is sacred to multiple tribes — and he wouldn’t pass off his support for racist monuments as deference to Native Americans.”
On Oct. 12, the day after the hearing, the ranking Democrats on six House committees joined together to write to their Republican counterparts and to Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) urging them to hold hearings in each of the six committees on the bill to create their costly, destructive border wall. House Republicans at the time were in the process of jamming it through with limited oversight and few amendment opportunities. The non-partisan Office of the House Parliamentarian had ruled that the border wall legislation includes provisions relevant to each of the committees’ jurisdictions.
On Oct. 13, Ranking Member Grijalva and Rep. Donald McEachin (D-Va.), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, spoke out on the release of a National Park Service employee survey — begun under the Obama administration — in which 38 percent of employees reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment. The Republican majority on the Committee has still not held a hearing devoted exclusively to the issue, either at the Interior Department level or at the various agencies, at any point in the 115th Congress despite repeated Democratic requests to do so. Committee Democrats released a report on the issue in January 2018 highlighting a number of steps the Trump administration should take to improve DOI’s sexual harassment problem.
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