(CN) — The Supreme Court on Monday declined to take on the question of whether the president is able to declare federal lands as part of a national monument when a separate federal statute reserves them for a specific purpose.
Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh would have granted the petition for writ of certiorari but did not write to explain why.
Two family-owned Oregon timber businesses, Murphy Company and Murphy Timber Investments, claimed President Barack Obama lacked the authority to issue a 2017 proclamation that added about 48,000 acres in southwestern Oregon to an existing national monument established to protect biological diversity.
Under the Antiquities Act of 1906, the president can declare that “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest” found on federal land are national monuments and can “reserve parcels of land as a part of the national monuments” so long as those parcels are “confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”
The timber company argued that the president's declaration was unlawful because some of the land in question was designated as timberland under the Oregon and California Railroad and Coos Bay Wagon Road Grant Lands Act of 1937. The law reserved them for permanent timber production and provided that the resulting revenue be directed back to those Oregon counties.
Nothing in the Antiquities Act gives the president power to suspend the operation of another act of congress, the company argued in its petition to the Supreme Court.
"The proclamation represents a particularly expansive and troubling exercise of the amorphous presidential discretion granted by the Antiquities Act— one that tramples the commands of a separate and directly applicable statute in a manner that threatens the separation of powers," the company wrote.
In April 2023, a divided Ninth Circuit panel upheld Obama's proclamation. The appellate court concluded that the Antiquities Act allows the president to repeal any disagreeable statute.
The majority leaned on a handful of prior decisions affirming the president’s authority in different contexts and the fact that the Supreme Court has never overturned an Antiquities Act proclamation.
U.S. Circuit Judge Richard Tallman, a Bill Clinton appointee, dissented, saying the proclamation authorized action that was specifically forbidden by the Oregon and California Railroad Act — and in doing so could financially devastate areas that are sustained by logging.
A group of Oregon counties and a trade association that advocates for sustained-yield logging filed separate suits in the District of Columbia challenging Proclamation 9564 as contrary to the Railroad Act. Although the federal court granted those plaintiffs summary judgment, the D.C. Circuit reversed, ruling that the proclamation’s prohibition on logging could be reconciled with the Railroad Act’s “‘permanent forest production’ mandate.”
Attorneys for the Murphy Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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