The administration of Joe Biden many times has simply issued a new edict, or a new “definition” of words, to expand its authority and power.
For instance, it has ordered several times that “sex” discrimination, as used when Congress wrote multiple laws back in the 1960s and 1970s, means “gender identity” and such. His efforts have been aimed at making arbitrary changes to what words mean, to push forward his agenda.
But now a lawsuit has resulted, as a rancher is challenging Biden’s arbitrary decision to put millions of acres out of reach for literally any use by calling it a national monument.
According to the Pacific Legal Foundation, Chris Heaton, a sixth-generation rancher, is suing for Biden’s abuse of the Antiquities Act to call the million acres in Arizona a monument.
“The Antiquities Act exists to protect Native American archeological sites, not to give presidents unlimited power to declare vast swaths of land and sea out of bounds for productive use,” explained Frank Garrison, a lawyer with the foundation.
“In our system of government, Congress makes the law and presidents are not allowed to ignore the constraints Congress places on their authority.”
While the federal law allows presidents to “create monuments on federally owned or controlled land,” it also limits what may suddenly be protected to only historic landmarks, prehistoric structures, or other objects of historic or scientific interest.
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Further, the legal team points out, “The statute also strictly limits a monument’s size to only what’s necessary for the care and management of the validly protected objects.”
Biden, instead, has demanded the “Ancestral Footprints National Monument,” to cover “entire landscapes, species, plants, and many other ‘objects’ that go well beyond the scope of the Antiquities Act.”
That, the lawyers say, simply is not allowed by the law itself.
The foundation noted, “When the Supreme Court declined to hear a previous case challenging a similarly excessive monument designation, Chief Justice Roberts sounded the alarm, noting that ‘[a] statute permitting the President in his sole discretion to designate as monuments ‘landmarks,’ ‘structures,’ and ‘objects’—along with the smallest area of land compatible with their management—has been transformed into a power without any discernible limit to set aside vast and amorphous expanses of terrain above and below the sea.'”
The rancher is fighting for the right to continue using the land his family has ranched for six generations.
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