House passes Bishop’s bill on creating monuments

The Salt Lake Tribune
By Thomas Burr
March 26, 2014

Washington • A proposed national monument would first have to go through an environmental review under legislation approved Wednesday by the House.

The House voted largely along party lines — 222 to 201 — to pass Utah Rep. Rob Bishop’s legislation that would restrict a president’s unilateral power to protect large swaths of public land without congressional approval.

Bishop said this approach is necessary to allow public input into monument designations that currently are done with a stroke of a pen and without environmental review. The bill, which would mark the first major change to the 1906 Antiquities Act in decades, now heads to the Democrat-controlled Senate, where passage is less likely.

Bishop, R-Utah, said good intentions were associated with the original act, but in recent times it’s been used as a "political weapon, a gotcha effort, a power play," done to appease presidential supporters.

"The way it has been used has changed radically," Bishop said. President Barack "Obama has already used it eight times and counting."

Rep. Chris Stewart said a thorough environmental review is a good idea and that any valid designation would withstand scrutiny.

"You have to twist yourselves into pretzels in order to object to this bill," said Stewart, R-Utah, whose district includes the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Its creation in 1996 raised the ire of some Utahns.

Democrats countered that Bishop and Republicans were simply trying to hamper a president’s ability to protect sensitive areas and slow down — or kill — the power to designate public lands as monuments. About half of America’s national parks began as monuments under the Antiquities Act, including four of Utah’s five national parks.

Arizona’s Rep. Raul Grijalva, a Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, said Bishop’s legislation was another GOP attempt to stall protection of public lands. He noted that only one bill to set aside wilderness has passed Congress in recent years.

Grijalva called the bill "another feather in the anti-environment cap," and said environmental reviews of monuments aren’t needed.