[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 108 (Monday, July 13, 2015)]
[House]
[Page H5093]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         ANTIQUITIES ACT ABUSE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. LaMalfa) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, last week, the President announced his 
plans to designate, once again, over 300,000 acres, this time of 
mountains, meadows, and other areas that stretch over 100 miles in 
northern California, including parts of Yolo, Solano, Napa, Lake, 
Mendocino, Glenn, and Colusa Counties, as a monument.
  This designation now marks the 19th time this President has created 
or expanded, since taking office, resulting in over 260 million acres 
of designated lands and waters in monuments or wilderness areas.
  This move actually exemplifies the President's complete disregard for 
the legislative process and his lack of hesitance on using every single 
political tool to carry out even more of his executive power grabs.
  Indeed, the one in Snow Mountain was a bipartisan effort underway, 
with legislators working on how that might become a designated area. 
Instead, that has now been usurped by one more round of executive 
power, kind of like we have seen recently with the Supreme Court 
exercising its power usurping the legislative process where we, the 
legislators, are subject directly to we, the people.
  Using the Antiquities Act as justification to designate over a third 
of a million acres in my State overnight is not only a serious abuse of 
power, it is a serious misrepresentation of the intent of the law 
itself. This law, the purpose of this law, which was enacted after 
archeologists years ago noticed small artifacts disappearing or ending 
up in private collections across different countries, was meant as an 
emergency option to curb looting in small archeological sites in the 
Southwest.
  The short and what would seem like simple text of the law actually 
directs the President to limit any designation to the smallest area 
compatible with proper care and management of the resource or the 
objects to be protected.
  Now, when you see 330,000 acres designated here or 700,000 designated 
in Nevada or, a few years ago, when President Clinton declared 1 
million acres in Utah, are we really protecting a particular area or 
zone or is this a widespread power grab?
  Indeed, what are we protecting it from? Well, you will hear from the 
left, from oil and gas development, from timber, from mining, or from 
all sorts of things that would be devastating to the environment.
  Have you noticed how hard it is to get a permit to do any one of 
those things, by the time you get through the EPA, U.S. Fish and 
Wildlife, and the whole litany of others that are in the way of doing 
things that could be done with good environmental stewardship at the 
same time as developing the resources that people in this country still 
need? They still need fuel; they still need oil; they still need gas; 
they still need paper products. Heaven knows, we use enough paper 
products in this building.
  But we need development in this country. We do it more responsibly 
than anywhere else in the world. Yet these wilderness area 
designations, these monuments, they don't seek to really protect 
anything. They just make it off limits to all Americans, even if you 
just want to go in for hiking or hunting or a little off-roading and, 
indeed, those that would develop the resources.
  This is so absurd, it even has made it difficult for fire suppression 
in our forested areas, for our various fire agencies to go do the job 
they need to do, to have the roads in the areas that are needed so they 
can attack the fires.
  And even more so, as we have seen what happened with the loss of life 
with illegal immigrants in this country, like Kathryn Steinle in San 
Francisco, illegal immigration, the effort to stop that at the border 
was made even more difficult, I believe, down in New Mexico when the 
President designated a bunch of the area along New Mexico as a 
monument, making it where the Border Patrol can't even patrol the areas 
because it is now an environmentally protected zone. That is 
ridiculous, and I think Americans, when they hear about this, say, 
``What is going on?''
  So this is, again, a power grab that is completely inappropriate. It 
bypasses the legislative process where the legislators are directly 
accountable to the people.
  It is about time that we change the Antiquities Act, or at least if 
we had somebody in the White House that knew the balance between 
designating just a small area that actually helps protect a resource 
and archaeological site versus hundreds of thousands or millions of 
acres that makes it just off limits to the type of use the public needs 
and actually makes the assets a safer and healthier one, for example, 
with our forests, where we can do the work that needs to be done to 
keep them healthy.
  Local residents have very little input, if any, on a designation 
happening in their backyard. Is this a transparent process? No.
  It is power in Washington, once again, ruling over the people, ruling 
over the stakeholders in those communities that know best how to manage 
the resource, what that resource needs, and what that could mean to the 
local economy, whether it is hunting or fishing or hiking, off-roading, 
even a little gold mining.
  We can do these things. We know how to do them environmentally 
responsibly, and yet we get run over time and time and time again by 
left-leaning folks using the Antiquities Act as something for their 
environmental dreams.
  Mr. Speaker, I am highly frustrated by this, and I hope the American 
public will get behind an effort to help us change the Antiquities Act 
and make it something that actually works for the American public and 
protects what needs protecting, not everything else.

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