Obama’s decision to designate a large area of land in Utah as a national monument generated a small number of headlines last week.
What many people don’t realize is that this has been going on throughout Obama’s presidency and that the amount of land and water he has claimed for the federal government is massive.
MRCTV reports:
Obama Seized Enough Land and Water in 8 Years to Cover Texas Three TimesIn a move ignored by the liberal media last week, Obama unilaterally seized more than 1.3 million acres from Utah to establish the Bears Ears Monument, preserving it at the behest of conservationist groups and Native American tribes who claimed the land was sacred. Utah’s state legislature, however, opposed the unilateral land grab across party lines, with many speculating that Obama’s move is the latest in an attempt to limit efforts from incoming President Donald Trump to expand domestic energy production.Obama also claimed 300,000 acres in Clark County, Nevada, as the Gold Butte National Monument, effectively closing the area off to future development for uranium mining, oil drilling or natural gas production.While it’s certainly nothing new, Obama’s habit of unilaterally confiscating land has ramped up heading into the final stretch of his presidency. In the eight years he’s been in office, President Obama has seized more than 553 million acres of land and water (roughly 865,000 square miles) and placed it under federal ownership and control – enough square mileage to cover the entire state of Texas more than three times over.
Why isn’t this big news? Is it because the liberal media likes big government and knows if more people knew this they would be alarmed? Possibly. Somehow I have a feeling a Republican president would have been called out for something like this:
Wielding the Antiquities Act of 1906, Obama has seized vast swaths of land and water for the federal government a total of 29 times, claiming more than 260 million acres as federally-protected spaces in 2016 alone (including a more than 100-million-acre plot in Alaska that amounts to the size of New Mexico).
As I mentioned, this is nothing new. In fact, Michelle Malkin has been sounding the alarm bell on this very subject since as early as 2010:
How Obama is locking up our landHave you heard of the “Great Outdoors Initiative”? Chances are, you haven’t. But across the country, White House officials have been meeting quietly with environmental groups to map out government plans for acquiring untold millions of acres of both public and private land. It’s another stealthy power grab through executive order that promises to radically transform the American way of life.In April, President Obama issued a memorandum outlining his “21st century strategy for America’s great outdoors.” It was addressed to the Interior Secretary, the Agriculture Secretary, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality. The memo calls on the officials to conduct “listening and learning sessions” with the public to “identify the places that mean the most to Americans, and leverage the support of the Federal Government” to “protect” outdoor spaces. Eighteen of 25 planned sessions have already been held. But there’s much more to the agenda than simply “reconnecting Americans to nature.”The federal government, as the memo boasted, is the nation’s “largest land manager.” It already owns roughly one of every three acres in the United States. This is apparently not enough. At a “listening session” in New Hampshire last week, government bureaucrats trained their sights on millions of private forest land throughout the New England region.
Read the rest here.
Going forward, we won’t have the problem of not hearing about things like this.
As they’ve already shown, the media will report everything Trump does with breathless panic.
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