House To Vote On Controversial ‘No More National Parks’ Policy

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/20/3416916/house-no-more-national-parks/

By Matt Lee-Ashley, Guest Blogger on March 20, 2014
Matt Lee-Ashley is a Senior Fellow with the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress

Responding to President Obama’s decision last week to protect a stretch of California’s Coast near Point Arena as a new national monument, the House of Representatives is planning to vote next week to overturn a 108 year-old law that presidents of both parties have used to protect iconic American places, including the Grand Canyon, the Statue of Liberty, and Arches National Park.

The bill, H.R. 1459, aims to block presidents from using the Antiquities Act of 1906 to establish new national monuments by putting caps on how many times it can be used, requiring congressional review of proposed monuments, and forcing local communities to engage in an ironic exercise of reviewing the environmental impacts of protecting lands for future generations.

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However, despite arguments from Bishop and Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) that Congress should hold exclusive power to decide whether or not to protect public lands, the House has effectively shut down all legislative efforts to protect wilderness, parks and monuments since the Tea Party takeover in 2010.

Until the passage of a bill to protect wilderness lands in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore last week, Congress had not protected a single new acre of public lands since 2009, the longest such drought since World War II. Adding injury to insult, Congress also forced a 16-day government shutdown last fall that cost national parks and local communities 8 million lost visitors and $414 million in lost visitor spending.

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By a margin of more than three-to-one, voters believe that leaders in Washington should be creating new parks and expanding opportunities for Americans to get outdoors, instead of closing national parks and cutting budgets for public lands.

A separate survey, commissioned jointly by Republican and Democratic polling firms, found that nearly seven in ten voters in the West say they are “more likely to vote for a candidate who supports enhancing protections for some public lands, like national forests,” suggesting that, in addition to its policy impacts, the political impacts of next week’s vote may stretch into November.