Republicans bristle at feds' land grab plan

The Politico ^ | 5/12/2010 | Marin Cogan

[Outside da Box]

A tightly held administration plan to consider designating up to millions of acres of land in the West as national monuments has Western Republicans up in arms.

[vpintheak]

What’s that communist Manifesto say? Something about the Communist goal being summed up in one ideal: The abolition of private property.
I know it goes something like that.

[TLI]

So. I wonder what is under that land?

Oil, gas, perhaps coal? Gotta be something “evil” down there they want to lock up “for our own good.”

[Little Ray]

I like the National Parks. But sometimes things get so bad, you have to sacrifice the “good” to eliminate the bad. The Federal Government owning, and closing off, huge sections of the country is so bad, that the National Parks might have to go in order to head it off.

[Enchante]

The National Parks are not really the issue here at all. Few in the west want to question the status of Yellowstone, Yosemite, etc. (yes, libertarians often reject many current federal govt functions as unjustifiable, but in any case one need not reject the existing National Parks to question why we need the WH to keep expanding federal control in the west).

All of the actual “National Parks” combined add up to just a tiny % of the lands owned and controlled by the federal govt. Far more is under the Bureau of Land Management, the National Forest Service etc. THOSE holdings are bloated and far too extensive — in many western states between 40 and 85% of ALL lands are under federal ownership or jurisdiction:

http://johnshadegg.house.gov/rsc/federal%20land%20ownership—may%202005.pdf

What the dishonest ‘Rats want to do is to use a provision that allows a President to declare a “National Monument” in order to lock up even more lands. When the Clintonistas declared a “National Monument” over vast stretches of lands in southern Utah, that was a gross violation of the purpose and obvious intent of the “National Monument” provision which was to preserve a small and unique geographic or historical item. Whatever one thinks of how that law had been used over the decades, NEVER had it been contemplated or used for locking away 1.9 MILLION acres (the so-called Grand Stairway Escalante National Monument which the Clinton frauds created in Utah).....