The fate of the two new national monuments of California could be summed up if President Donald Trump can erase it in the same way as it has become – with a pen.
On this issue, legal experts on the opposite sides of the political spectrum differ, throwing the basics of a potential battle of a court with a result affecting protections for around 960,000 acres of Californian land.
While his mandate ended in January, President Joe Biden created Chuckwalla and the national monument of Sáttítla in northern California to consolidate his environmental heritage, which includes the protection of more public land in a single term of the White House than anyone in addition to Jimmy Carter.
Named for the Lizard found in the Sonoran and Mojave desert and North West of Mexico, Chuckwalla, which borders Joshua Tree National Park in the South, includes a sacred land for Native American tribes, a commercial road used by 19th century gold prospectors and an area used by General George Patton to form American war in the world war II.
Trump supports the opening of federal land for mining and oil and gas drilling. Its administration, wishing to undo the environmental rules of the Biden era, confirmed plans to dissolve the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla in mid-March, according to the Washington Post and the New York Times.
An information sheet of the White House published online on Friday March 14 said that Trump has signed an executive decree “The termination of proclamations declaring nearly a million acres constitute new national monuments which lock large quantities of land of economic development and energy production,” reported the Post and Times.
But this line disappeared from the information sheet the following afternoon, leaving the supporters of Chuckwalla confused on what will happen, added the newspapers.
Biden created Chuckwalla using its authority under the 1906 antiquity law, which allows presidents to create monuments by executive decree, according to the National Constitution Center.
Debates on the question of whether the presidents can cancel the monuments without the date of approval of the congress in the 1930s, the center reported. In 2017, conservative lawyers John Yoo and Todd Gaziano pleaded that Trump has an independent authority to abolish the monuments.
“Under the traditional principles of constitutional, legislative and administrative law, the authority to execute a discretion includes the power to reverse it,” wrote Yoo and Gaziano in an article published in the Yale Journal of Regulation.
The opinion of an American prosecutor of 1938, arguing that the presidents cannot unilaterally dissolve the monuments, “is poorly reasoned” and “misinterpreted a previous opinion, which came to the opposite result,” added Yoo and Graziano.
Mark Squillace, professor of law faculty of the University of Colorado, who worked as a lawyer of the Interior Department during the Clinton administration, argues that the presidents cannot cancel the monuments by themselves.
The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 “deletes doubt as to whether the congress intended to reserve the power to revoke or modify the national proclamations of the monument, because the Congress declared if explicitly,” said Squillace and others in a 2017 article published by the Virginia Law Review.
The news that Trump wanted to undo the monuments angry the supporters of Chuckwalla, who put Biden for years to preserve the earth.
“Trump elimination of the national monuments of Chuckwalla and Sáttítla is a horrible affection against our public land system,” Ilenene Anderson, director of the California desert at the Center for Biological Diversity, said by e-mail.
Joan Taylor, president of the California / Nevada desert committee of the Sierra Club, said by e-mail that for decades, “the presidents of the two parties used national monuments to preserve cultural and historical land, significant wildlife and access to nature for people.”
“The national monuments like Chuckwalla benefit from crushing public support. Unilaterally revoked protections of national moments would be both unpopular and illegal,” said Taylor.
Jack Guerrero, a member of the central committee of the County County County who is the treasurer of the State Party, said by e-mail that the Trump administration “simply examines and, if necessary, revising the status of public lands that President Biden has hastily appointed as monuments at the very end of his mandate”.
He added: “The key to any change in the status of Chuckwalla and other recently designated monuments is to assess the options for land use, to weigh their long -term costs and advantages and to consult various stakeholders throughout the region, including our local tribes. I think that this complete evaluation by the Trump administration is reasonable.”
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
