Celeste Maloy: “I thank the chairman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I am grateful for the opportunity to be here today, and I commend my…”

“I thank the chairman for yielding. Mr. Speaker, I am grateful for the opportunity to be here today, and I commend my colleagues in the Western Caucus for their unwavering dedication to preserving the values and livelihoods of rural America, the Western States, and our Western values that we both represent. I will highlight today three pieces of legislation that I have introduced. One of them addresses abuses of the Antiquities Act, one of them addresses the inefficiencies and unfairness of our permitting system, and the other one addresses the need to get geothermal energy up and going more quickly and more efficiently. Mr. Speaker, I will start with the Antiquities Act. For decades, the executive branch, Presidents of the United States, mostly Democrats, have used the Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate vast areas as national monuments, and that is in an authority that we delegated to them in the Antiquities Act of 1906. The abuse of that narrow delegated authority has resulted in restricted access to lands, hindered economic opportunities, and it has left local voices unheard and frustrated. In my district, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was created by Bill Clinton in 1996, over the objections of Utah's Governor, Utah's Federal delegation, and local, county, and State- elected officials. Those frustrations and scars and wounds have not healed in the years that have passed since then. Mr.…”