Arizona Republican leaders challenge Utah monuments
Republican leaders in the Arizona Legislature are asking a federal appeals court to claw back a national monument in Utah as they plan to file their own lawsuit over a new monument closer to home.
In legal papers filed Monday, Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Ben Toma urged the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a decision by a trial judge to allow hundreds of thousands of acres of two national monuments in Utah to remain protected.
In an August ruling, U.S. District Court Judge David Nuffer said there is no basis for lawsuits, one filed by the state of Utah and the other by Garfield County, asking him to void President Joe Bden's decision to restore the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. Both had originally been designated by President Barack Obama but were scaled back in 2017 when Donald Trump became president.
Now that case is on appeal. And Petersen and Toma are siding with Utah.
The Utah filing comes after Petersen said in September he gave the greenlight to Senate attorneys to sue the Biden administration over the new Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument that covers over 1,400 square miles around the Grand Canyon, calling the monument an “unconstitutional land grab in Arizona.”
In the filing with the 10th Circuit, an attorney for Petersen and Toma argued Congress only authorized presidents to designate historic landmarks and other objects, and the Utah monuments — and the Grand Canyon monument as well — overstep that authority
At the heart of both cases is the Antiquities Act, which allows the president to set aside historic landmarks, prehistoric structures and “other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated on land owned or controlled by the federal government to be national monuments.”
What the president is doing, according to the new filing, is interpreting the term “objects'” in the law — the things that the Antiquities Act allows him to protect — to mean "whatever he wants it to mean, such as plants, animals, qualities and experiences, and geological features.''
Petersen said Monday that the state is still gathering facts and doing interviews before it files its own challenge.
“There is a lot of upfront work before it is filed,”' he said.
But Senate press aide Kim Quintero said there is a benefit to Arizona weighing in now in the Utah case, with its own attorney, ahead of its own challenge.
“This brief will help lay the groundwork,” she said.
