SCOTUSblog by Kalvis Golde 3/11/2024
The Petitions of the Week column highlights a selection of cert petitions recently filed in the Supreme Court. A list of all petitions we’re watching is available here.
Congress has given the president the power to create national monuments on public lands. Those monuments are overseen by the Department of the Interior. But Congress has also charged the agency with managing a wide array of other public lands, sometimes for purposes of development instead of preservation. This week,we highlight petitions that ask the court to consider, among other things, whether Barack Obama had the authority as president to expand a national monument in the forests of Oregon into land overseen by the Interior Department.
At issue in this case are two separate laws. Enacted amid the destruction of Pueblo ruins in southwestern states, the first law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, gives the president the power to designate areas of land owned or controlled by the federal government as national monuments and protect them from development.
Thirty years later, in the second law, the Oregon and California Railroad and Coos Bay Wagon Road Grant Lands Act of 1937, Congress directed the Interior Department to enforce sustainable harvesting of timber in a broad swath – nearly 2.6 million acres – of federally owned forest in Oregon, with instructions to ensure both a “permanent forest” and an economic benefit to local residents.
In the spring of 2000, then-President Bill Clinton designated 52,000 acres of forest spanning the California-Oregon border as the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument to preserve its “extraordinary biodiversity.”
Nearly 17 years later, in one of his last acts in office, Obama expanded the boundary of the monument on the Oregon side by nearly 48,000 acres and barred logging in the new parts of the monument. Part of that forest is governed by the 1937 law.
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/03/timber-industry-federal-government-battle-over-preservation-of-southern-oregon-forest/
