From Mother Jones · Wyatt Myskow · · 1m 40s
Utah voters want their monuments back
Two-thirds of Utah voters say Trump shrank Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante too far, and the lawsuits are back on.
In brief
Two-thirds of Utah voters say Trump shrank Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante too far, and the lawsuits are back on. The Antiquities Act lets a president create a national monument but says nothing about shrinking one, and that gap is what the lawsuits turn on. Originally reported by Mother Jones.
Two-thirds want them restored
New polling finds 67 percent of Utah voters back returning Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante to the boundaries they had before Trump cut them.
Three million acres to 302,600
Two July executive orders shrank the monuments to under a quarter of their former size, matching the administration's push to open public land to mining.
Claims staked before the ink dried
Protections vanished for scores of archeological sites and some of the last intact landscapes in the country. Mining interests started staking claims before the downsizing finished.
The tribal coalition was dissolved
The orders wiped out the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition, which built the co-stewardship model. 69 percent of Utahns opposed ending it, and 82 percent say tribal voices matter.
“Tribes should have been consulted.”
Not a partisan split
81 percent of Utahns oppose selling public land to private buyers, and nearly three-quarters back the presidential power to designate monuments. Utah Republicans have pushed the other way.
“These findings are profoundly telling and should not be ignored.”
The lawsuits restart
Trump tried this in 2017 and got sued. The cases paused when Biden restored the monuments. Patagonia, Access Fund and a coalition of green groups have now moved to reopen them.
A law that only goes one way
The 1906 Antiquities Act lets presidents create monuments, not shrink them. That power sits with Congress. A DOJ memo argues otherwise, and legal scholars doubt it survives court.
“Earth-moving equipment, flags staked, and a just general industrial presence within these really beautiful, undeveloped landscapes is a tragedy.”
The one thing
The Antiquities Act lets a president create a national monument but says nothing about shrinking one, and that gap is what the lawsuits turn on.
