Ethan Blevins - Should Utah get its land back?

The federal government controls millions of acres across the West, including land rich in coal, uranium, and other natural resources. Should Washington continue making those decisions, or is it time for states to have more control? Ethan Blevins is a Legal Fellow at the Pacific Legal Foundation. He joins the show to discuss President Trump's plan to reduce Utah's national monuments, the Antiquities Act, and the debate over federal land ownership. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hey, welcome back to the Lars Larson Show. Well, I just said it has been years since we talked about the Bears' ears. So we've got to talk about it today. I thought we'd put that to Ethan Blevins, who's a legal fellow at the Pacific Legal Foundation. Ethan, welcome back to the program.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Thanks so much for having me, Lars.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

So how did you tell my audience how Utah came to lose, effectively lose control of all these millions of acres?

SPEAKER_01 0:46

Sure. So about two-thirds of the state of Utah is owned by the federal government, and that has a lot of consequences for the state and the people who live, work, and play in the state. And one of the things that the presidents over past over many decades have done on federal lands is designate national monuments under a law called the Antiquities Act. And what a few Democratic presidents uh have done in Utah is declare millions and millions of acres uh to be national monument land, which restricts economic uses, natural resource extraction, recreational uses. It basically gives the president authority to be a local voting board over the state of Utah to uh over Utah's objection. And the president uh has recently removed a lot of that national monument. So the two national monuments at issue, Bear's ears, another one called Grand Staircase Escalante, were reduced by President Trump to about 90% by about 90 90 percent. So they're much smaller now. Unfortunately, there's been this ping-pong back and forth where one president expands the monument, one president shrinks the monument, which is really why this is should be left to Congress, or better yet, to the states to regulate their own land instead of this political football.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

Well, and I guess I'd be in favor, in this case, of the federal, because if if the land is under federal ownership, uh then that means all of us own that land. All of us in common own the coal, the uranium, uh, natural gas, anything else that's under there. It's owned by all the American people. So I don't want it necessarily to be under the control of, say, a state, because I think of what California does. We have massive amounts of natural gas and oil off the coast of California on underwater federal lands, and yet we can't touch them because California says no way. And now, if I'm wrong about that, uh please correct me. But in this case, I'd love to get this back to what I I can't imagine that the Antiquities Act was originally envisioned as something that would be used to protect millions of acres of land, or was it back when they first passed it?

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Yeah, you know, people who speak ordinary English that say, well, why is this law that allows the president to lock up millions of acres of land called the Antiquities Act? It's a weird, um, it's a weird phrasing, and that's because the Antiquities Act had a very different purpose. In 1906, when it was signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt, its purpose was to protect Native American ruins from being looted. And that's a good thing, right? We will want the president to be able to stop looting of these ancient ruins, but it's gone far beyond that. Now we have uh, you know, President Obama in the 2010s declaring about three million acres of ocean off the state of uh off of the New England coast to be a national monument. Or in this case, you know, millions of acres of sagebrush are now a national monument. So this is an example of a law going far beyond its original purpose and presidents abusing this authority. We have Congress that can create national parks, it can create wildlife refuges, it's perfectly capable of protecting land, and we don't need the president to be lawmaker in chief to make sure these lands are protected.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

I'm talking to Ethan Blevins, who's a legal fellow of the Pacific Legal Foundation. The one that bothered me, I think, probably the most was correct me if I'm wrong, but during one of the years of President Auto Pen, Joe Biden, uh they made a gigantic chunk of land near uh the Grand Canyon, which was I mean, Grand Canyon itself is already protected as part of a national park or a national monument. But uh Biden expanded that dramatically and took in millions more, and they deliberately locked up land on which we were told had some of the most available and accessible uranium deposits in America. And there was nothing special about it other than it being big, empty land and somewhat adjacent to the Grand Canyon. Have I described that inaccurately?

SPEAKER_01 4:53

No, that's right. That monument's called ancestral footprints. And what happened there, which is uh, you know, it's a sign that really this doesn't belong in the president's uh wheelhouse. There had been a political effort to get Congress to expand the Grand Canyon. Well, and that fails, um, as we've seen in recent years. What lobbyists do is they go to the president and say, Mr. President, Congress has not done this. Well, you just do this for us. Well, that of course is not the president's job, but nonetheless, um, that's what happened. And there are people who ranch on that land, there are people who uh mine that land, who play on that land, who've essentially been locked out of it just because the president, you know, signed a proclamation.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Well, and because they have all these groups like the Bears Ears National Monument, the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, the Weiss Foundation, the Grand Canyon Trust, and they spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbying, don't they?

SPEAKER_01 5:47

They do. And uh, you know, when we don't have um a deliberative body like Congress making these decisions, then the special interests end up being able to take even greater control. You know, we don't have we don't have congressmen from Utah worrying about the locals who can make these decisions. The president makes it over the objection of um you know Senator Mike Lee or Representative Celeste Malloy who have fought for um more local control, more congressional action. Um, and that's the problem with putting the president in charge of lawmaking. We have a deliberative body that's supposed to represent the people, not special interests.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Okay, so what's the chance we can actually get Congress to act on this? They don't seem all that anxious to do their job lately.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

Well, I think that's right. They're they're going to continue to let this sort of ping-pong of every four years, you know, a new president comes in. So this is not the first time President Trump has shrunk these monuments. He did that in during his first term. President Biden comes in and basically reestablishes what President Obama had done. And then now President Trump has reduced them again. Well, what's going to happen when the next Democratic president comes in, rolls in? Of course, he's going to expand them again. Um, I think what really needs to happen at this point, because obviously Congress is not stepping in, is we need courts to enforce the limits in the Antiquities Act, which is actually a very clear law. It says you can designate um historical landmarks of historic, uh, historic objects, um, scientific objects. It's not talking about landscapes. Um, and also says the smallest area compatible with protecting those land, those, those objects. So now we have the president, for example, in Ancestral Footprint said, Well, this species of cactus is an object of historic interest.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Unbelievable. That's Ethan Blevins. Ethan is a legal fellow at Pacific Legal Foundation. Thanks so much, Ethan. 866, hey Lars. Send emails to talk at LarsLarson.com. I got a warning for you. Thousands of places on the internet have a file with your name on it. And I've got one of those files as well. Your home address, your cell phone number, all kinds of personal data, how you vote, even your kids' names. Now you can't read that file, neither can I, but anybody with a credit card can buy it. The file's the product of a multi-billion dollar industry called data brokers. Your information gets collected, packaged up, and sold. That's legal. But every scam call, every phishing text that knows too much about you, somebody bought that file. Last year, Americans lost a record, $20 billion to fraud. Scammers didn't get lucky, they got prepared. I did something about my file. I used Incogni. INCO GNI. They go broker by broker and force all those data brokers, delete the file. Go to incogni.com slash Lars for 60% off. That's INCO GNI. Incogni.com slash Lars.