In 1867, Russian Tsar Alexander II sold Alaska for $7 million in a deal orchestrated by American Secretary of State William H. Seward. Endowed with expansive autocratic power, the Russian Tsar executed this transaction with the stroke of a pen. At the time, Russians critical of the deal were threatened with charges of sedition and exile. Meanwhile, Americans critical of the exorbitant cost have forever since labeled the transaction Seward’s Folly.
History has exonerated Seward and hasn’t been as kind to Tsar Alexander II and his mighty pen. Today we see the Alaska transaction as a geopolitical master stroke and a coup in that the Americans acquired Alaska and its wealth of natural resources for what would be the paltry sum of $100 million in today’s dollars. Russia still has not forgiven the Tsar for using the autocrat's pen recklessly.
Well, you know what they say about history. Those who are too senile to remember history are doomed to repeat it, and those who are fanatically obsessed with reckless political ideologies are doomed to ignore it. If you’ve ever wondered what America would look like if it were governed through the pen stroke of a Tsar that would sell us out for probably nothing more than a few lines of cocaine, it will look like what happened in Arizona this week.
On Tuesday, President Joe Burisma Biden designated the 1.1 million acres Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kuveni Grand Canyon National Monument in northern Arizona. Through nothing more than a Tsar’s pen stroke, he ripped the economic heart out of several Western communities that were struggling to survive Bidenomics. As has happened with other reckless national monument designations, this designation will start the slow death of the cattle ranching industry in the area. Those celebrating the monument are already celebrating the instant death of the area’s mining. The other casualties that are sure to come will be the loss of recreational access and the loss of a local tax base that can fund essential services.
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While the local impacts will be catastrophic, the worst impacts from this monument will be geopolitical. These 1.1 million acres boast some of America’s richest deposits of uranium, and there isn’t a single story about the designation that doesn’t acknowledge the purpose of this monument is to protect this land from uranium mining permanently. The consequence of protecting American uranium from Americans is that Americans now must continue getting their uranium from Russia – a country President Biden is warring against through economic sanctions. You can’t win an economic sanction war if you’re not willing to replace the resources you’re sanctioning with domestic supplies. Instead of replacing Putin’s uranium with American uranium, we’ve transformed an outdated law designed to protect archaeological artifacts into a self-sanctioning suicide vest that has given the Russians a monopoly on atomic energy.
Americans, especially Americans in the West, need immediate and permanent relief from the tsar’s pen strokes detonating this suicide vest. This relief can come from several of our institutions if they rise to the challenge. The Supreme Court certainly has a role to play in correcting the false interpretation of the Antiquities Act that presidents believe gives them vast and amorphous powers to designate entire landscapes as monuments. As an asset acquired through the blunder of a Tsar’s pen, we should be grateful that Congressional action exempted Alaska from ever being blundered away again by exempting Alaska from the Antiquities Act. It’s time for Congress to give all Western states the same protection against reckless Tsars. Also, what the Tsar’s pen giveth, the Tsar’s pen taketh away. President Trump used the Antiquities Act to shrink national monuments. In order to get the vote of any Western Republicans, every candidate in the current GOP presidential field should make it clear how they will protect our land, our resources, and our communities from the Antiquities Act so that it can never again be used by the likes of President Joe Biden to sell us out.
The one silver lining in Biden’s Folly is we now know how seriously Americans should take the endless badgering about climate change. If President Biden were serious about replacing the base load of American power generation with the one carbon-emission-free source that can actually succeed, he wouldn’t have used executive action to permanently undermine our future of becoming a nuclear-powered nation. This national monument, combined with the ceaseless litigation war waged by his allies and donors in the environmental movement against any effort to develop domestic sources of lithium, nickel, and rare-earth minerals, tells us the inconvenient truth the American people need to know about climate change alarmism. It’s a racket, and nothing more, being run by a dotard and his family of racketeers who can’t even outsmart the Russians.
Phil Lyman is a Utah State Representative and former San Juan County commissioner.
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