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Tough to Undo What Clinton Did NewsMax.comThe Bush-Cheney administration is finding it's one thing to denounce the former president's monumental federal land acquisitions, quite another to reverse them. Not only that, but also President Bush is stuck with the bill for taking proper care of all those millions of additional acres the Clinton-Gore administration left in his lap without funding. In an interview with the Washington Post, the new interior secretary, Gale Norton, spelled out the new administration's dilemma. Yet she held out some hope Bush would still be able to find ways of pruning back much of the scope of what his predecessor tried to accomplish when he skirted Congress with a blizzard of executive orders in the waning days of his scandal-plagued presidency. President Bill Clinton had established 19 national monuments, totaling more than 5 millions acres, almost all in his final year in office and expanded three others – with minimal or no consultation with Western lawmakers and business leaders. At the center of the issue is Clinton's use – many Republicans call it misuse – of the authority granted to presidents by the venerable Antiquities Act of 1906 in creating or dramatically expanding those national monuments, thus placing millions of acres of federal land off-limits to the public. It was clear from Norton's interview that the new administration is not going to waste time butting its head against what it believes is an impossible brick wall to knock down. Instead of trying to overturn all those Clinton directives, it will concentrate on surgically scaling them back. ''I certainly disapprove of the process by which those monuments were generally created,'' Norton said, "but I have not yet heard any calls to repeal any of the monument designations." She criticized the Clinton-Gore administration for hastily designating monuments without conferring adequately with state and local officials and property owners. While such criticism is music to the ears of some Western governors, lawmakers and property owners who regard Clinton's wholesale actions as federal intrusion into their way of life, what they really wanted to hear was a total revocation of those decrees. Indeed, Bush had led them to believe that's what might happen. Within hours of taking office, the president put on temporary hold scores of last-minute Clinton orders and regulations dealing with the environment, health, food and safety, and workplace conditions, pledging to review every last one. But as White House staff and congressional Republican leaders explored ways to turn back the environmental rule-making, they ran into two rude sets of realities. One, they concluded it would be next to impossible to undo many of Clinton's orders, because of cumbersome and lengthy procedures required to reverse any executive order. Two, which was probably the governing reality, they realized the strong pro-environment coalition on Capitol Hill would successfully block any major changes. Now, the interior secretary is saying her department and Congress could work with local officials, property owners and business executives to address their concerns, for example by allowing existing mining operations to continue. ''We may need to manage those plans in a way that takes into account current uses and that better tailors the monuments for local needs and circumstances,'' she said. It is a bitter legacy Clinton has left for his GOP successors. Not only are they giving up on reversing him, he is sticking them with the considerable tab to maintain all those millions of acres now under national-monument status. The interior secretary said the federal government has no current appropriated funds for that. Nor, apparently, was the Clinton-Gore administration a very good steward of lands already in its care before the big expansion of national monuments. ''We're now cleaning up after the fact and doing things that should have been done before the monuments were designated,'' Norton said. ''The monument designations were more show than substance. We now have to provide the substance.''
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