Both of our cases to defend Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante revolve around two key legal issues. One is an issue of statutory law and the other is constitutional law, and they’re conceptually related. (Read the legal documents.)

The statutory issue is that monuments are governed by the Antiquities Act, which is a statute enacted into law during the Theodore Roosevelt administration. It’s been used by 16 presidents since Teddy Roosevelt to protect some of our most valuable public lands.

Congress doesn’t act quickly, hardly ever, so the act provided a mechanism for the president to act quickly to protect land while Congress takes its time on national park designations. In practice, that means that some of our most valuable national parks, like the Grand Canyon, Arches and Acadia, were all originally protected as national monuments. Thanks to the Antiquities Act, these iconic places were still there and intact when Congress eventually protected them as national parks.

But the Antiquities Act, as written, is a one-way ratchet. It gives the president the authority to designate the protection of a monument, but it doesn’t give the president the authority to unprotect monuments. That is something Congress can do, but there is nothing in the act that gives presidents that power. So when Trump purports to be acting under the act, that authority simply isn’t there.

The constitutional issue is very similar except it’s a matter of constitutional law. The constitution gives Congress, not the president, authority over public lands. Congress can delegate its authority to the president, but it has to do so by statute, and that delegation of authority is only as broad as Congress makes it in the statute. And in the Antiquities Act, Congress’s delegation of authority to the president is limited, specifically that the president can act to protect a monument. But the Antiquities Act provides no delegation of authority to the president to reduce an already-designated monument, which is exactly what Trump is doing.

By exercising authority that the constitution gives to Congress and that Congress hasn’t delegated to the president, Trump is violating the separation of powers.

There is another legal argument for the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In the 21 years since its designation, Congress has passed several statutes that essentially ratified the monument, including a 2009 bill that included all national monuments in a new, protected category of lands called the National Landscape Conservation System. The president has no authority to repeal that legislation with an executive order. He just can’t do it.

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