Pickerington,
Ohio -- Former U.S. Interior
Secretary Bruce Babbitt is wrong to urge President Obama to use executive
powers to close off public land, the American Motorcyclist Association
said.
In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington,
D.C., on Feb. 5, Babbitt, who
served as Interior secretary under President Bill Clinton, said the current
administration should use the Antiquities Act and other powers to protect
public land from development.
But Wayne Allard, a former U.S.
representative and U.S.
senator from Colorado
who now serves as the AMA vice president for government relations, said such
actions would bypass the people's representatives in Congress. He called the Babbitt
comments disappointing.
"The administration shouldn't unilaterally decide how public land should
be managed," Allard said. "Those decisions need to be made in
Congress, with input from citizens and officials in the affected
communities."
The Antiquities Act of 1906 allows the president to declare national monuments.
The federal law was initially passed to protect native American artifacts such
as pottery from being taken from small tracts of federal land in the West. That
is, Congress determined that national monument designations were to be confined
to very small areas.
But presidents haven't interpreted the law to apply to small areas. Clinton created an uproar in 1996 when he designated 1.9
million acres in southern Utah as the Grand Staircase-Escalante
National Monument.
President George W. Bush used the Antiquities Act to circumvent Congress and set
aside the future use of thousands of square miles of the Pacific
Ocean without public debate. In 2006, he designated 140,000 square
miles of ocean and 10 islands and coral atolls in the northwestern Hawaiian
Islands as a U.S.
national monument.
National monuments don't automatically ban off-highway vehicle use but a
national monument designation makes it much easier to ban their use without
input from the public, elected representatives and affected communities.
