Sixteen presidents have used the 1906 Antiquities Act to designate 157 monuments; however, no president has ever tried to roll back a designation.
Under law, only Congress has the power to roll back a designation.
Indeed, Utah politicians are feverishly attempting to roll back the designation (and also to decrease the size of the nearby Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument), which recognizes Bears Ears not only for its value as a public land, but also as a sacred Native American site full of ancient artifacts.
New York University, whose proposed campus expansion has caused concern in the surrounding neighborhoods, backed the designation, as did Sylvette David, a former muse for Picasso and the inspiration for his "Bust of Sylvette," the 36-foot-tall concrete sculpture that has rested among the buildings since 1968.
"While we're disappointed, the ruling doesn't weaken the mandate to protect habitat for endangered wildlife," said Collette Adkins, a lawyer with the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group that backs the designation.
But to succeed, they simultaneously have to push back against that designation.
Some have also repeatedly shifted the second-home designation back and forth among various houses, allowing them to make renovations on more than one property at taxpayers' expense.
It is true that Bruce Babbitt, Ms. Norton's predecessor, failed to prepare the citizens of Utah for the first monument designation, back in 1996, but he consulted exhaustively on all the rest.
Such a designation, backed by 75 senators including Mrs. Clinton, would have gone beyond the measures taken yesterday by the administration, which imposed more narrowly drawn sanctions on the guard corps and its elite Quds division.
Other annotations are present in the figure; the designation back-side or front-side attack have a semantic meaning that is not immediately obvious to someone not very familiar with the original research.
