Scared Monkeys Discussion Forum

DEMINT: White House land grab


Proposal to seize land would favor animals over Americans

Using the Antiquities Act, President Carter locked up more land than any other president had before him, taking more than 50 million acres in Alaska despite strong opposition from the state.

President Clinton used the authority 22 times to prohibit hunting, recreational vehicles, mining, forestry and even grazing in 5.9 million acres scattered around the country. The law allowed him to single-handedly create 19 new national monuments and expand three others without consulting anyone.

President Obama could do the same in other energy-rich places unless Congress takes action. At least 13.5 million acres are already on his Department of Interior's real estate shopping list.

This includes a 58,000-acre area in New Mexico. The memo said this should be done so the lesser prairie chicken and the sand dune lizard will be better protected. Are these animals going extinct? No. The bureaucrats wrote that the land should be locked up to "avoid the necessity of listing either of these species as threatened or endangered."

In Nevada, the Obama administration might make another monument in the Heart of the Great Basin because it, supposedly, is a "center of climate change scientific research."

In Colorado, the government is considering designating the Vermillion Basin as a monument because it is "currently under the threat of oil and gas development."

The President has chickens on his mind. Prairie chickens, to be exact.

They aren’t being targeted by KFC. They aren’t even on the endangered species list – a mammoth concoction of animals who have garnered more governmental favor than humans.

No, these prairie chickens of great importance and national magnitude roam on one of 14 properties from Montana to New Mexico that Obama could nab through presidential proclamation, a move that would cordon off the lands from being used to create jobs – through ranching, forestry, minding and energy development – and instead erect useless monuments or give tree-huggers a place to write their poetry.

    The 21-page document, marked “Internal Draft-NOT FOR RELEASE,” names 14 different lands Mr. Obama could completely close for development by unilaterally designating them as “monuments” under the 1906 Antiquities Act.

Rep. Robert Bishop (R-Utah) thought maybe that memo should go public after all, especially since these presidential lands grabs are done without the state’s consent.