Not satisfied with placing banks, insurance companies, and the car industry under the control of the federal government, President Obama has turned his sights on the American West.

This is the startling revelation contained in a letter published Tuesday by the Washington Times penned by South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint. In the three-page exposé, Senator DeMint cites a 21-page secret Obama Administration document reportedly bearing the designation “Internal Draft-NOT FOR RELEASE” wherein the President sets forth his plan to federalize more than 10 million acres of land in the Western United States by placing it under the “protection” of the Department of the Interior. The pernicious nature of this scheme is illuminated when one discovers that the “federal government owns approximately 650 million acres nationwide, including about 80% of the land in Nevada and 63% of the land in Utah.”

According to DeMint’s description of the memo, the President identifies 14 pieces of land that “might be good candidates” for the unilateral executive land grab. Of the myriad valid reasons for opposing this action, Senator DeMint lists the loss of jobs (“ranching, forestry, mining, and energy development”) and the loss of tax revenue that will “dry up” the funds needed to maintain “schools, firehouses, and community centers.”

Ostensibly, the proposed seizure of so many valuable tracts of land is justified as a measure necessary for the preservation of habitats and hiking trails. This would be accomplished by proclaiming the parcels “monuments” as provided for by the Antiquities Act of 1906. Under the provisions of that Act (officially styled the “Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities), a president is empowered to restrict the use of public land by way of executive order. The first president to exercise this authority was Theodore Roosevelt who created Devil’s Tower National Monument and the Grand Canyon National Monument under the Act’s auspices. More recently, George W. Bush cordoned off almost 200,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean, proclaiming them to be undersea monuments.

It was the misuse (constitutionally speaking, there is no proper use) of this power by former Presidents Carter and Clinton that prompted Representative Robert Bishop (R-Utah) to blow the whistle on this inchoate plan for a massive federal land grab. During the Carter Administration, over 56 million acres of oil-rich Alaskan wilderness was appropriated by the executive branch and slapped with the “monument” label. So heinous and controversial was this overreaching that Congress weakened the Antiquities Act by passage of the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act requiring Congressional approval for any seizure of land over 5,000 acres.

As for President Clinton, he ordered such forfeitures 22 times during his eight years in the White House, locking away 5.9 million acres all told throughout the country. It is one of these uses that is near and dear to the heart of Representative Bishop. In 1996, Bill Clinton created the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by taking control of 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utah. Over 135,000 acres of this land was being leased by private developers were producing over 65,000 barrels of oil a year from five active wells. Bill Clinton’s fiat shut down those operations and capped those wells for good, depriving the country of a significant source of domestic energy.

Representative Bishop fears that if he hadn’t made the memo public then President Obama would have followed his predecessors and latched onto millions of square miles of valuable property. The editorial written by Senator De Mint states that the Obama Administration already has 13.5 million acres on its “shopping list” of prime real estate. Particularly noteworthy is the Department of the Interior’s zeal to stake a claim to land in Nevada because it considers it to be a “center of climate change and scientific research.”

The locations targeted in the Obama Administration's secret plot to seize public land by stroke of the pen include the following: the Northwest Sonoran Desert, Arizona; the Berryessa Snow Mountains, California; the Bodie Hills, California; the expansion of the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, California; the Modoc Plateau, California; the Vermillion Basin, Colorado; the Northern Montana Prairie, Montana; the Heart of the Great Basin, Nevada; the Lesser Prairie Chicken Preserve, New Mexico; the Otero Mesa, New Mexico; the Owyhee Desert, Oregon and Nevada; the Cedar Mesa region, Utah; the San Rafael Swell, Utah; and the San Juan Islands, Washington.

Proving that in this case he puts his measures where his mouth is, Senator DeMint sponsored an amendment to prevent President Obama from issuing an executive order carving out any land for a “national monument” from the already shrinking available acreage that as yet remains outside federal control.

Unsurprisingly, the Senate voted 58-38 against the DeMint resolution and played patsy once again to the executive branch’s haughty disregard for the limited power granted it by the Constitution and for the Tenth Amendment’s once impregnable wall safeguarding the sovereignty of the fifty states. If such abuses continue to go unchecked soon there will no longer be a nation known as the United States of America. In its place, there will stand the United State of America.

 Photo of Sen. Jim DeMint: AP Images

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James Salata said:

	... Good story. More bad news. Does anyone feel like it's getting more and more hopeless as time goes on? Thanks for teaching me some things I was unaware of. Especially with Carter and Clinton and of course Bush. I'll be passing this info on to others to be sure.
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March 03, 2010
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JJ Suprise said:

	Where did they get the power? Where did they get the authority to pass the Antiquities Act? Was it from the "everything under the sun clause"? Just curious.
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March 03, 2010 | url
Votes: +5

Always American said:

	... Reason.tv: Billionaires vs. Brooklyn’s Best Bar – Eminent Domain Abuse in the Boro of Churches and Gin Mills http://biggovernment.com/ngillespie/2010/03/03/reason-tv-billionaires-vs-brooklyns-best-bar-eminent-domain-abuse-in-the-boro-of-churches-and-gin-mills/
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March 03, 2010 | url
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Lee Gonzales said:

	Hopeless? Not at all. How many Senators jumped up to protest George W. Bush whenhe sealed off 200,000 square miles of ocean from exploration and mining of needed minerals, natural gas and oil that potentially lie beneath the ocean? Omama is giving the US Senators a reason to use their backbone. I'll take the 38 who stood up with Demint and hopefully in November he'll get some more help.
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March 03, 2010
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Wheatfarmer said:

	Land Grab Why don't the sovereign states tell the fedgov to (ahem), "stuff it?"
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March 03, 2010
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Flu-Bird said:

	SIC SEMPTER TYRANUS OBAMA Our elected dictator is all set to use his dictorial pwers to steal thousands acres and place in under the conctrol of his IMPERIAL DEPT of the INTERIOR like any typical despot and tyrants DOWN WITH BARACK OBAMA
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March 03, 2010
Votes: +5

For Freedom... said:

Same Old, Same Old...environmental land grab! During President Clinton's administration there was a similar agenda back in 1991, it was called the Wildlands project. TNA reported on it: In November 1991, the "Wildlands Project" was co-created by environmental journalist Reed F. Noss and Dave Foreman, the erstwhile führer of Earth First! As described by Charles C. Mann and Mark L. Plummer in Science magazine, the Wildlands scheme "calls for a network of wilderness reserves, human buffer zones, and wildlife corridors stretching across huge tracts of land --hundreds of millions of acres, as much as half the continent." Designed to help realize the vision of a "wild and healthy planet," the Wildlands Project, according to Mann and Plummer, calls for the re-primitivization of at least half of the United States: Marxist tendencies.....cut from the same cloth.

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March 04, 2010
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George said:

	... I agree with Wheatfarmer. If the state legislatures would simply pass a law stating that they do not recognize the Federal governments authority to illegally sieze property this would stop. It is up to the states to take a stand. Put pressure on your state legislators to enforce the 10th Amendment.
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March 04, 2010
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The Warner said:

	Sedition Through Confiscation Hey KIWI, This is reclassification to "Monument" status. Thisa meena ua noa drilla. Ha? It musta bea dark upa thaira wherea ua noa seea nottin wita O-Bomb-A-Nation ish concerned. Eeefa ua soa smarta shousa ua kopee offa hiza birt surtificat. Ah?
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March 04, 2010
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race_12_1 said:

more land to misuse kwellso--You apparently do not realize that changing the status of land from being managed by the BLM to a national park or monument completely changes what the land can be used for. Land managed by the BLM can be used for ranching, grazing, off road vehicle use, it can be leased, and it can be sold if the government so chooses to do so. Once the land is designated a national monument or park, all of these uses are stripped, and it can longer be leased or sold. So this action is very serious. As well, some of the lands in question are valuable for the resources which lie in them, and potentially under them Some believe that the government is seizing these lands in an attempt to secure future control of natural resources, not to protect them.

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March 04, 2010 | url
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Bonnie said:

Article I, Section 8, Clause 17 To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of Particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;-- I don't seem to be able to find any authority listed for federal lands such as parks, monuments, grasslands, forests, preserves, reserves, recreational areas, etc. I can't even see any way to pervert the oft misused 14th Amendment to grant this authority, either.

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March 04, 2010
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