In that article, that the Daily Wire uses as a reference as to where they get their news… so it would be rather stupid to dismiss it out of hand, you will find that the President Obama designated Federal Lands as National Monuments in order to connect already existing National Monuments.
I will have to check into it. I know Clinton seized a lot of private land in Utah to establish a “monument”.
Seemed to be a payoff for some illegal contributions from Indonesia.
There was a huge amount of low sulfur clean burning coal(Indonesia was a huge supplier of low sulfur coal and didn’t want the competition) there along with oil and gas worth tremendous amounts of money(I seem to recall the geological estimate was around a trillion dollars) till Clinton took it and gave them minimal payment.
The Utah Governor raised holy hell to no avail. It was on a copy of US News and World Report that i owned.
So an Obama grab would certainly not be the 1st such by any means.
The formation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was a little more complicated, because there were lands within it that were under the management of Utah, but once again that was all Federal Land.
People were miffed because they were going to build a coal mine… and then they couldn’t anymore.
Within where the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was designated, there were no contiguous plots that the State of Utah were allowed to manage for State Schools.
Those plots were exchanged for an equivalent of federal lands in other parts of Utah, mineral rights and $50 Million in cash. But that was Congress who did that… not Clinton.
Congress basically made Clinton’s pushing Utah being able to develop land under their management whole.