President’s power to protect national resources under attack

The casual observer might think that all anyone in Congress is doing these days is worrying about or arguing over the federal debt limit.

But that would be wrong, because some in Congress are busy pursuing an ideological agenda designed to set the nation back by more than a century — and it has nothing to do with the budget.

There’s a vigorous attack on the Antiquities Act, which was passed in 1906 and has been used by 15 presidents — from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush — to protect some of our nation’s most beloved natural, cultural and historical places.

You may have heard of some. Places like the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, the dinosaur deposits of Utah or Death Valley. Closer to home, there are the Indian burial mounds at Hopewell Culture National Historical Park south of Columbus. We can thank President Warren G. Harding for protecting that area in 1923.

And not all the antiquities being protected are natural wonders or green fields. The Statue of Liberty is on the list, along with Thomas Edison’s laboratories in New Jersey, which were designated for protection by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956.

The most recent area to receive a president’s protection from encroachment was the Rose Atoll, an 8.6-million-acre section of the ocean that is the home to rare species and corals. That was done by President George W. Bush in 2009, the last of six designations by the 43rd president.

Which is to say that President Obama has made no designations for protection as an antiquity. That’s not unusual among presidents in the early years, since most have a lot of things on their plate when they take office, and Obama had more than most.

There are some Republicans in Congress who now want to make it impossible for Obama to ever declare any area protected. For the first time in 105 years, a president would be told the Antiquities Act doesn’t apply to him.

Congress would maintain its ability to designate monuments, something it has done 40 times, most recently in 2009 when it created the Prehistoric Trackways monument in New Mexico, 5,280 acres of land containing fossils of prehistoric flora and fauna. But they would bury presidential prerogative.

The first attempt failed in February when an amendment was proposed on the House floor to the Continuing Appropriations Resolution.

Opening a new front

Not to be deterred, backers of the movement are trying to achieve in a subcommittee what they couldn’t pull off on the floor.

The Interior, Environment and Related Agencies subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee wants to bar the president from expending any federal funds in the pursuit of designating an Antiquities Act monument. This isn’t about money or the budget, it is about usurping a power that every president since Teddy Roosevelt has used.

The Wilderness Society, a proponent of conservation, has been monitoring this activity and views the threat as real.

There is, however, a Republican congressman from our backyard who could — and should — make a difference. Steven C. LaTourette, a nine-term Republican who serves the 14th District that stretches from northern Trumbull County to Lake Erie, is on the Interior, Environment subcommittee.

LaTourette describes himself as a moderate and often votes accordingly. He should do so in this case, squashing a radical move to fix a 100-year-old law that isn’t broken.

The Appropriations Committee and its subcommittees have important work to do without reverting to this kind of “we got the power now” nonsense.