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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gao seng who wrote (137603)	4/11/2001 9:07:44 PM
From: Gordon A. Langston	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Scumbria, like Clinton and Gore just pays lip service to "the children". Monument Abuse On September 18, 1996, President Bill Clinton stood in the Arizona sun on the rim of the Grand Canyon and announced the establishment of the 1.7-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (Utah Monument), seventy miles away in Utah. He quoted Teddy Roosevelt and praised the beauty of the Utah lands he and Vice President Al Gore had chosen to ``protect.'' From what threat was the President protecting these lands? ``I am concerned about a large coal mine proposed for the area,'' the President said. ``[W]e shouldn't have mines that threaten our national treasures.''\1\ \1\Remarks Announcing the Establishment of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument at Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, 32 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 1785 (Sept. 23, 1996). Far from threatening our national treasures, the mine project inappropriately killed by the Clinton Administration would have provided millions in funds for Utah's schoolchildren--which Clinton and Gore call ``the greatest resource in the country.''\2\ \2\ Gore Pushes Technology, Better Pay for Teachers, Greensborough News & Record, May 29, 1997, at B5. At the time the Utah Monument was designated by Presidential Proclamation No. 6920, an environmental impact review of the ``large coal mine'' (the Smoky Hollow Mine) referred to by the President had been underway for nearly seven years.\3\ As required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Office of Surface Mining and Reclamation (OSM) had produced a comprehensive preliminary draft environmental impact statement (PDEIS) that was prepared for public comment. This report reviews that PDEIS and shows that the characterization of the project as a threat to the lands designated under the Antiquities Act was purely a pretext and not supported by the record. The substance of that review is contained in this report. \3\Proclamation No. 6920, 61 Fed. Reg. 50,223 (1996). The American public, watching the Escalante campaign event, may have believed the President when he warned of the mine's supposed impact on sensitive lands. People had no reason not to take the President at his word at that time. Documents and records obtained by the House Committee on Resources and reviewed in this report now show that the President's statement was as far away from accuracy as he was from Utah. The only thing the President was trying to protect by designating the Utah Monument was his chance to win reelection. The ``threat'' motivating the President's action was electoral, not environmental. The Utah Monument was designated pursuant to Section 2 of the Act of June 8, 1906 (Antiquities Act), which allows the President to reserve parcels of federal land as national monuments by public proclamation.\4 The language of the Antiquities Act makes clear, however, that the land reserved ``shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.''\5\ The Act contemplates that objects to be protected must be threatened or endangered in some way. For example, a proclamation withdrawing Devil's Hole in Nevada was upheld in court because it was not solely for the purpose of preserving the unique limestone formations in Devil's Hole pool, but also to protect the endangered pupfish from possible extinction due to agricultural use of the pool's water.\6\ Ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/thomas/cp105/hr824.txt