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A friend has sent you a link to an article found on FlatheadBeacon.com. To read the full text of this article online, click here: http://www.flatheadbeacon.com/articles/article/rehberg_antiquities_act_could_be_used_for_land_grab/16401/ ARTICLE EXCERPT: Montana Congressman Denny Rehberg has introduced legislation that would exempt Montana from the Antiquities Act. What’s the Antiquities Act? Before last month, when Utah Congressman Rob Bishop discovered a “secret” Interior Department memorandum, I couldn’t tell you. Basically, it grants the president the right to declare any area of the country a national monument and there is little anyone can do to stop him. In the memorandum, thousands of acres, including 2.5 million in Montana, were listed as potential monuments and it has put the Interior Department on the defensive. From the New York Times: A spokeswoman for the Department of the Interior, Kendra Barkoff, said the list was not secret at all, but simply a “very, very, very preliminary,” internal working document resulting from a brainstorming session that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a Democrat and former senator from Colorado, had requested about the lands in the West. “No decisions have been made about which areas, if any, might merit more serious review and consideration,” Ms. Barkoff said in a statement. Rehberg, who says he sees the potential for a federal “land grab,” sent a letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar asking him to provide details of the proposals and wrote a bill that would require Congress to approve any new national monuments in Montana. He sent out the following statement Thursday: “For more than a century, the Antiquities Act has served a valuable function in the preservation of America’s natural treasures, making it all the more tragic that it’s now being misused for a 13 million-acre land-grab. When it comes to land in Montana, we’ve got a long-standing tradition of working together to find consensus-based solutions. Circumventing that tradition by unilaterally carving out millions of acres with the stroke of a pen is not the American way. The President is not a king, and we are not his subjects, which is why congressional checks and balances are so important.” Here’s a link to the Interior memo (.pdf).