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Photo: Tim Peterson, Grand Canyon Trust A week after insulting Navajo veterans of World War II -- the code talkers who helped to win the war in the Pacific -- under a portrait of the odious Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States announced the unprecedented removal of National Monument status from over 1,000,000 acres of land in Utah whose protection had been sought by Navajo and other tribes. Fortunately, the United States does still have three branches of government, and it is possible that a Federal court will agree that that the Antiquities Act does not give a president this authority. Still, as widely reported yesterday, the president is asserting just such authority in Utah, and if successful he may try to do the same in many other states, though not in Montana . In the NPR report above, Matt Anderson argues that President Obama's naming of the Bears Ears National Monument had itself been overreach, and that reverting to BLM status would keep "the areas open ...

The most important qualification for most Cabinet-level appointments in the current administration has been hostility toward the mission of the department or agency to be led, and to the implementation of policies that the Congress has assigned. In most respects, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has fit this mold. As the most anti-stewardship steward of public lands since James Watt, he has been good company for secretaries of State, Education, Environmental Protection who have a similar antipathy toward the programs with which they have been intrusted by an administration that values only chaos and a Senate that does not value its advisory duties. This post, however, is not about Secretary Zinke's failures to protect Bears Ears, or whether he shares the libertarian fringe's fear of "massive federal land grabs." Rather, it is this counter-intuitive story about Sec. Zinke's support of a new  National Monument that would provide added protection to federal lands in his...