PHOENIX — Last month, President Joe Biden visited Arizona to announce the creation of a new national monument adjacent to the Grand Canyon National Park. Now, Arizona Senate Republicans want to sue the Biden administration over it.
On Monday, the Arizona State Senate Republican Caucus announced that it planned to file suit against the Biden Administration by the end of 2023 or early 2024, claiming that a "fact-finding phase is currently underway."
The Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument sets protection standards for 917,618 acres of land in three distinct locations north and south of the Grand Canyon. Tribal leaders in the area have pushed for the creation of such a monument for years.
Under the new designation, mining is off limits in the area. Roughly 3,000 known cultural and historical sites fall within the monuments boundaries.
A press release from the State Senate called the monument "nothing more than a publicity stunt" and said the mining restrictions would "further exacerbate our dependency on dangerous foreign nations for our energy supply."
Most of the mining that happens in the area is uranium mining. Nuclear energy accounts for roughly 20% of total annual U.S. electricity generation. Furthermore, domestic production of Uranium peaked at 43.7 million pounds produced in 1980.
The U.S. hasn't produced more than five million pounds of uranium in a year since 1997, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Of the roughly 40.5 million pounds purchased by the U.S. in 2022, 27% came from Canada, 25% came from Kazakhstan, and 12% came from Russia.
The Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument was created under the 1906 Antiquities Act, the same act that allowed for the creation of four similar monuments in Arizona by the Clinton Administration in 2000-2001. The monuments kept their status after a 2017 executive order from then-President Donald Trump forced a review.
Senate President Warren Petersen called the monument's creation "blatantly unconstitutional," but did not specify which statutes of the constitution were violated in the press release.
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