Sen. Lee speaks about his Emery County tele-conference

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What do coal-fired power plants and public lands have in common? For one thing, you can find an abundance of both in Emery County. But there’s more: both are routinely targeted for excessive regulation by the Executive Branch of the federal government.
This has long been a serious concern for the citizens of Emery County. But recently it has taken on a sense of urgency with the new restrictions on the coal industry issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the possibility that President Obama could use his final year in the White House to designate the San Rafael Swell as a national monument, which would impose severe land-use restrictions.
Last week I talked to residents of Emery County about the need to curb the overbearing involvement of federal agencies in the county’s energy sector and public lands, which can have devastating effects on its economy.
Laren Huntsman and Ethan Migliori, called in to a tele-townhall that I hosted from my office in Washington, D.C., which is a massive conference call that recreates the traditional townhall atmosphere over the phone and live streaming on the internet. Huntsman is the Managing Director of Rocky Mountain Power’s coal-fired
Hunter Plant. He asked what Congress can do to mitigate the impact of environmental regulations on jobs in Utah. Commissioner Migliori, wanted to know my perspective on the EPA’s stringent regulations and the recently announced moratorium on new coal mining leases on federal lands.
I told Mr. Huntsman and Mr. Migliori that the first thing Congress should do to stop the Obama administration’s efforts to shut down the American coal industry is to exercise its power of the purse and withhold funding for the implementation of the EPA’s new power plant regulations. But we must also develop solutions that address the root of the problem, which is that Congress has, for several decades, surrendered many of its powers to the Executive Branch.
A perfect example is the Antiquities Act, which was created in 1906 to give the president unilateral authority to designate tracts of federal land as national monuments in order to protect archaeological sites from looting. But for the past century, presidents of both parties have exploited the statutory ambiguity in this grant of power to seize vast stretches of public land, like the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, that are far bigger than federal agencies are capable of managing properly.
There’s a simple solution to this problem: Congress needs to take back its lawmaking authorities that it has too often surrendered to a power-hungry Executive Branch, both by amending old laws, like I’ve proposed to do with my amendment to the Antiquities Act, and through reforming the regulatory process with measures like the REINS Act. As Mr. Huntsman and Mr. Migliori know first-hand, the actions of our hyperactive Executive Branch can have ruinous effects on the lives and livelihoods of the citizens of Emery County. I am deeply concerned about these abuses of executive power, and I am committed to reining in the administrative state by putting Congress, the most accountable branch of government, back in charge of federal policymaking.