The Great Clinton Land Grab

In a story in its Tuesday issue, the Christian Science Monitor is reporting that:

Clinton is cramming his final days in office with locking up one massive "national monument" after another under a little-noticed law – the Antiquities Act of 1906 – enacted back when Theodore Roosevelt was president.

Since then, all presidents but three – Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush – have used this power, which does not require approval of Congress.

None, however, has employed it so extensively as Clinton, who has set aside nearly 5 million acres of the public's real estate – mountains, deserts, forests and ocean environments – in a dozen additional national monuments, thus sealing them off from future development.

These range from a 2.1-acre plot in Washington, D.C., containing the Anderson Cottage, Abraham Lincoln's summer home where he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, to the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, covering 1.9 million acres.

Now Clinton has found yet another, even more-sweeping way to shelter federal territory that doesn't require declaring them national monuments.

For example, he has issued a unilateral order that puts some 60 million acres – nearly one of three acres in all national forests – off limits to road building.

But the prospect of a national monument that has environmentalists most excited is one that would provide protection for the 19 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeast Alaska.

It also happens to contain as much as 16 billion barrels of recoverable oil. The industry insists that with modern recovery techniques it is now possible to extract and transport the oil without harming the environment or native residents.

Environmentalists are not impressed. Fearful that a George W. Bush administration would open this reserve to oil exploration, they have been urging Clinton to go for it while he still can.

They realize that his doing so will give added emphasis to efforts to curb a president's ability to use the Antiquities Act of 1906 with such abandon. But they are insistent just the same.

Five of the national monuments that Clinton has created this year in Arizona, Colorado, Oregon and Washington are already under attack in court.

Speaking for one of those litigants, William Perry Pendley, president and chief legal officer of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, said:

"Clinton has thumbed his nose at the West, at the Constitution and at Congress, saying essentially, 'Stop me if you can.' "

And Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, has introduced a bill in Congress that would require congressional approval of all future national monuments.

"No one wants the president, acting alone, to unilaterally lock up enormous parts of any state," he said. "We certainly don't work that way in the West."