Some state legislatures, the most recent being Maine, have explicitly passed laws denying permission for the transfer of land to the Federal government. Maine's law prohibits such transfers for the purpose of National Monuments. It is commonly dismissed as "symbolic" because everyone knows that the Federal government is ignoring it. Obama did just that in an act of staggering corruption with a wealthy political activist funding plans by the National Park Service to expand its own empire in defiance of Congress, the governor, the state legislature, and the local people who overwhelmingly oppose it.

One fallacy seen frequently is that state denial of permission to cede territory violates the "supremacy clause of the Constitution", misrepresented to mean that the Federal government can do whatever it likes regardless of the states. That is of course false: the supremacy clause says that state law must be in accordance with the US Constitution and in accordance with Federal law that is itself in accordance with the Constitution. State law in accordance with Article 1 Section 8 Clause 17 of course is directly in accordance with the Constitution and Federal statism ignoring that itself violates the supremacy clause.

There is also no provision in the Constitution granting the Federal government the authority to buy and preserve land and water with National Parks or any equivalent.

This post-constitutional era of rampant statism ignoring the Constitution except for some matters of procedure out of nothing but political momentum is frightening.

AJ,
All this brainless puppet is doing is what someone is paying him to do regardless of any consequences incurred by the nation. Who ever it is that is paying him wants to destroy the nation for some purpose that I cannot fathom hard as I try. It is obvious that the nation is dying due to actions taken by the civil servants (that is a contradiction) who have NEVER contributed anything to the nation, nor do they intend too. The constitution of the USA is nothing more than an old piece of paper that has no meaning for these civil servants. If the elected representatives serving in the congress had a backbone they would have started impeachment proceedings against the man several years ago, but they are all in league with him because they are all birds of a feather. why they think that the largest of companies will continue to exist in the not to distant future when they do not have employees is beyond me.

There are two massive National Monuments being pushed for the coastal fisheries off New England. Both have been very controversial.

The Maine legislature passed the law prohibiting the transfer of land in the state to the Federal government for a National Monument only a few months ago. https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

It was in direct response to Roxanne Quimby's threat to transfer the land Obama just decreed as a National Monument, thumbing his nose at the state. But Quimby is not the "wife of the Burt's Bees guy" and it was not a "donation". The history is much more sordid.

Quimby is a 1960s counter culture political radical who bought the land specifically to impose Federal control. Calling this a "gift" is euphemistic cover for the corruption of buying government policy, and the outrageous rationalization claiming that she can "do what she wants with her own land" is a grotesque conceptual inversion by an anti-private property rights zealot exploiting her land ownership and government corruption to permanently destroy private property rights as a matter of principle.

The contradictions are deliberate political strategy and inherent in her ideology. Progressives think they have a "right" to use government power as a tool to impose anything they want, and in their infinite wisdom expect us to think it is a "gift". They certainly do not believe that property owners have a "right to do what they want with their own property" even in the normal, common sense usage of that phrase. But we are expected to believe that Quimby's property ownership gave her a "right" to impose Federal control.

The National Park Service and its lobby first promoted taking over about 10 millions of acres of private property in Maine for several massive new National Parks almost 30 years ago, intending to eliminate the timber industry, private property and the private economy for the sake of government forced mass wilderness restoration and preservation of primitive pre-settlement conditions.

The massive media and lobbying campaign was thoroughly beaten back, but tore up the state and disrupted peoples' lives fighting for years against entrenched pressure groups and government officials. Quimby started buying land in 2001 to get around the rejection by planning a direct unilateral transfer on behalf of a radical Wilderness Society offshoot organization called "RESTORE: The North Woods". It's leaders had collaborated with NPS and its private lobby arm the National Parks and Conservation Association (NPCA) in the original political planning. It has stressed pushing for a smaller, "only" 3.2 million acre National Park Service takeover in northern Maine.

Quimby was on the board of directors of Restore and has continued to give it millions of dollars in tax free 'donations' for their common political ends. Knowing she could not buy millions of acres herself from owners who refuse to sell to her, her stated intention is that her land is to be a "seed", a "downpayment", and "to give the movement momentum" so that the National Park Service can take over the rest.

She found that that under Federal law (reformed in the 1990s to stop NPS from planning and politically stampeding people for new land takeovers) it is illegal to establish a National Park without 1) Congressional approval, 2) a Congressionally approved New Area Study preceding that, and 3) demonstrable local support prior to approving a "study". Quimby's "non-profit" organization over years spent millions of dollars on Washington political consultants, deceptive media campaigns, organizing and threats, push polls, and phony "studies" with preconceived outcomes, all trying to get the Maine Congressional delegation to submit legislation, which it would not do without local support.

Quimby wanted the transfer to be regarded as a "gift" to the National Park Service for its centennial celebration this month (August 25), and that is why she arranged with her crony insiders in Washington for the presidential decree, grotesquely distorting a law that was never intended to be a means to establish National Parks by bypassing Congress. The Interior Dept had promised Sen. Collins of Maine that it would not pursue a "study" on its own.

What led Quimby to this? She attended a radical San Francisco arts college and as a full-fledged counter culture New Leftist in the early 1970s traveled across the country to Maine in a battered VW bus with her boyfriend to become a "back to the lander" living in primitive conditions. She found her later cohort Burt Shavitz living in a converted turkey coup and selling bees wax to eek out a living. She once said that her business break-through contribution was to re-package the wax in tiny containers, selling it at a high markup, exploiting the natural-is-good fad. She raked in the money, bought out Burt for a pittance, and eventually sold out the company "Burt's Bees" to Clorox for over $320 million. Her sister, who is in finance, guided her.

Out of her "generosity" she bought Burt a house, but he said he didn't like it and later moved back into his turkey coop.

Up to the point of selling the company, that was all legal, if not ethical, but it more resembles the old time scam artists selling elixers out of the back of a wagon than an admirable American industrialist or entrepreneur.

Many people don't understand why she would spend the money on land for the government, puzzling over what kind of tax write-offs she is arranging to make money off it. But no tax breaks can outdo a few hundred million squandered to destroy private property rights with a government takeover of land. The truth is much simpler, though difficult for normal people to understand. Like Obama, she lives like royalty, but their actions are the direct destructive result of a corrupt, nihilistic philosophy put into practice by someone with the means and the evil to do it.

Here are some samples:

Bangor Daily News July 10, 2011: "Now that she is wealthy, she sees a responsibility to give back to the land that sustained her during her early days in Maine spent in a tent without electricity or running water.

“'I can think of no better thing to do with Burt’s Bees profits than to return them to the earth,' Quimby said."

"In addition, she said, Maine’s strong property rights ethic – which is sometimes raised as an objection to the park – actually works to her favor because people accept the notion that she can do whatever she wants with a piece of land after she has bought it. Waging her battle with money, she said, means she doesn’t have to argue with people about her philosophy of protecting the land." [Remember the contradiction in that.]

Forbes Oct 3, 2011: "... it’s the symbol of what one person can do to make a difference…to make the changes that we need to make so as to live on this earth in the future. I think it goes right back to unity… I don’t mean to be apocalyptic about it – but I have always been a student of metaphysics and tried to sensitize myself to another dimension and get in touch with it and see if there’s something to learn…one of the things I believe is that unless we unify our spirits on a completely global scale, we are just another failed experiment." [By "metaphysics" she means New Age, not Aristotle.]

"The time that I spent living without electricity in the woods of Maine was really formative for me. It was so clear that I was not in charge, not for one minute… the humility factor – Mother Earth…. I think we need to have more opportunities to have humans interacting in Nature and feeling safe doing it. And I think national parks make it safe."

Yankee Magazine 2008: "Roxanne needed more money than what she was making. One day, she stopped to buy honey from a pickup truck parked by the side of the road. She became friendly with the man selling the honey, a gruff, bearded beekeeper named Burt Shavitz. He was older than she by 15 years and was having back trouble. She offered to help him, and he gladly accepted, as he could use a woman with a good strong back. That summer, she learned how to keep bees and how to render honey. 'I was inspired by the bees, the way they all worked together,' she says. 'I thought, 'Oh, what good little communists they are. Well, except for that queen in there...'"

"In concert with RESTORE, what she has in mind is a national park. 'I feel like my reason for being put on this earth will have been fulfilled because this will live on after me. A park is a demonstration that there is something in America that I can love,' she says, her counterculture philosophy re-emerging..." [Like Michelle Obama, all she can 'love' about America is her own power to impose her ideology.]

"When Roxanne was growing up, she often played Monopoly. 'I loved that game,' she says. 'I had two sisters and a brother, all younger, and they were always available to play. I hated to lose, so I always made sure, one way or the other, that I won...'"

"Roxanne’s plan is somewhat counterintuitive. She returns to the bees of her past: 'To me, ownership and private property were the beginning of the end in this country. Once the Europeans came in, drawing lines and dividing things up, things started getting exploited and overconsumed. But a park takes away the whole issue of ownership. It’s off the table; we all own it and we all share it. It’s so democratic.'”

Maine Public Radio 9/16/11: "'I still believe that a 3.2 million-acre park is a fabulous idea. I'd like to see a ten million-acre national park!', Quimby said. 'I love national parks and the bigger the better! But in terms of what I can accomplish as an individual I think that there are limitations. And because private property rights and my rights as a landowner figure so importantly into this discussion, I feel best about limiting the conversation to land that I own so that's why I'm talking about 70,000 acres and not 3.2 million but theoretically the sky's the limit!'" [10 million acres is 2/3 of Maine, almost all of it privately owned.]

Quimby (and her political supporters) have been pushing for a "limited" 150,000 acre National Park "seed" comprised of land she has for years dishonestly claimed to own as her "gift": In fact she has trapped inholders owning 40% of the land and who are targeted for removal. That is why the National Monument decree is a patchwork of about 88,000 acres and she continues to pressure for Congressional legislation for government acquisition authority.

Needless to say, the publicly promoted euphoria over Quimby's "centennial gift" does not allow for any of this to be reported.

It isn't about parks, it's about government parks and preserves. For those who think that this is the least of the problems with government -- how much can go wrong managing wilderness and picnic tables? -- the answer is more than you can imagine.

People are bullied and pushed around in the name of land declared to be "Nationally Significant" as an excuse, fueled by orgies of emotional manipulation worshiping poetic scenic imagery. Not mentioned in the flurry of PR over the National Park Service centennial (how often do we get to celebrate a government agency -- will IRS get this, too?) is that NPS has senselessly forcibly removed over a hundred thousand people across the country. An arrogant Federal agency hiding its abuse behind scenery and emotional fervor is more dangerous, as the minority hit by it while even critics of government ignore it know all too well.