AP Photo Obama vs. McKinley Alaskans praise the move to rename America's tallest mountain, even as Republicans vowed to fight it.

For 40 years, it’s been Alaska vs. Ohio.

Denali vs. Mount McKinley.


Native Americans protective of their culture vs. American history buffs mindful of the last president of the 19thcentury.

Now, after President Barack Obama removed the name of former President William McKinley from the nation’s highest peak, restoring the traditional name of Denali, the seemingly endless sagahas takena new turn. Members of Congress, led by a speaker from Ohio ,are debating whether to attempt to overturn the ruling.

A “deeply disappointed” House Speaker John Boehner of Cincinnati tweeted out his opposition Sunday night, after reports that Interior Secretary Sally Jewell had issued an order changing the name at Obama’s behest.

Congress could pass a new law to block Jewell’s order on the renaming of the mountain. But Democrats would almost surely block the move, not to mention the likelihood that Obama would veto any such legislation.

Despite the long odds, many Ohio representatives seemed eager for a legislative fight.

"President McKinley was a proud Ohio Republican who was assassinated during his time in office while serving our nation and deserves the recognition Congress previously awarded him,’’ declared Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Dayton, Ohio, in a prepared statement.

Rep. Bob Gibbs of rural Washington Township, Ohio, blasted the move on Twitter, calling it “constitutional overreach” and said he would be working with lawmakers on the House Natural Resources Committee to see what can be done “to prevent this action.”

Boehner’s staff said the speaker was still unsure of his next action.

But in Alaska, where the state government had long supported a name change, the reaction to the move was strikingly different. Tribal leaders and many other Alaskans cheered the move as a sign of respect for native language and tradition.

Obama’s decision to side with the native Alaskans over a president who never visited Alaska was reminiscent of other, largely symbolic recent moves to redress historic injustices to minorities or promote minority interests. They include his efforts to present posthumous medals to blacks and Jews who were denied them in past wars, his lighting of the White House in rainbow colors to support the right to same-sex marriage, and his recent hiring of the first-ever transgender White House staffer.

“This action recognizing a native language, recognizing something that Alaskans wanted to do for a long, long time ... does speak well in his legacy and treatment of Native Americans in general,” declared Ed Alexander, a board member of Gwich’in Council International. “He’s the first president to have a White House tribal summit annually. It really shows that level of respect.”

Richard Peterson, president of the central council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian tribes of Alaska, agreed.

“It symbolizes that our first people of Alaska are still here,” he said. “President Obama, especially in his second term, has done more than any other president for Alaskan natives in recent history.”

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, joined in praising Obama’s move, noting that most Alaskans had been fighting for decades to make the name change.

Dana Wright, a descendant of one of the first people to climb Denali, who then himself climbed the massive peak in 2013 to draw attention to the need for a new name, said of Obama: “In terms of things he could do, this probably took very little effort but had a big impact for a lot of people. If he hadn’t done this, it probably would’ve gone back and forth in Congress forever.”

Indeed, the fight over renaming the mountain would likely have been resolved years ago, if not for the doggedness and maneuvering of former Rep. Ralph Regula, an Ohio Republican and ardent backer of McKinley’s legacy who worked for decades to block the renaming of the peak.

Early on, after the Alaska legislature asked the federal government to change Mount McKinley’s name in 1975, Regula helped broker a compromise that named the broader national park Denali while keeping the mountain itself named after McKinley. But that peace offering failed to mollify Alaska lawmakers, including fellow Republicans like Rep. Don Young, and the feud between the two states continued to simmer.

So Regula came up with a new legislative gambit to prevent an obscure government agency—the United States Board on Geographic Names—from bowing to Alaska’s wishes. Because the agency’s own guidelines forbade the board from changing a name if Congress was also considering the matter, Regula introduced legislation affirming the McKinley name, thus blocking the agency from taking action, a tradition he continued until his retirement in 2009.

But fellow Ohio lawmakers took up the torch and continued his blockade after his retirement, even as members of the Alaska delegation offered their own bills to change the name to Denali.

In the end, it took an Obama administration executive order to lay the matter to rest, although Jewell nodded to the Regula strategy in her order to change the name.

“While the Board does have a policy of deferring action when a matter is being considered by Congress, contradictory bills on this issue have been proposed by various members of Congress since the late 1970s,” Jewell wrote, while noting that the Interior secretary can take action when the “Board does not act within a reasonable time.”

Not surprisingly, many Ohioans dispute that interpretation.

Ohio Sen. Rob Portman called Obama’s move “yet another example of the president going around Congress.”

Portman added, in a later tweet, “McKinley was a proud Ohioan, and the mountain was named after him as a way to remember his rich legacy after his assassination.”

Actually, McKinley’s name was affixed to the mountain by Alaskans before his election to the presidency. Alaska, at the time, was a large producer of gold, and McKinley’s Democratic rival in the 1896 election, William Jennings Bryan, was campaigning on a pledge to peg the nation’s currency to silver, not gold.

McKinley defeated Bryan and went on to serve as commander in chief during the Spanish-American War. He was re-elected in 1900, but six months after his inauguration he was assassinated by an anarchist while shaking hands with well-wishers at the World’s Fair in Buffalo, New York.

His vice president, Theodore Roosevelt, assumed office and took the country in a more liberal direction, leading to unprecedented growth of the federal government and its power. Though Roosevelt has assumed a larger place in history, McKinley continues to be well-remembered by conservatives who favor a smaller government.

Karl Rove, the longtime adviser to former President George W. Bush, is set to publish a new book on McKinley. But he sounded a more moderate note than the Ohioans, urging that Obama find a new way to honor McKinley.

“The 25thpresident gets overlooked too much already. Would hope the president would find another appropriate way to honor McKinley. Luckily there’s a book coming out about McKinley in November,” Rove wrote in an email to POLITICO Playbook.

This article tagged under: Barack Obama

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