A presidential order that doubled the size of a national monument in Oregon has withstood a timber company’s lawsuit but hasn’t yet survived its final legal test.

While the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument’s expansion, another federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., could soon contradict that ruling.

If such a clash occurs, a legal debate that began six years ago may continue before the nation’s highest court.

“We knew when we first filed suit, that it may ultimately have to be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Doug Robertson, executive director of the Association of O&C Counties, which represents local governments that have lost revenue due to logging curtailments.

Former President Barack Obama’s 2017 decision to enlarge the national monument to more than 100,000 acres had immediate economic impacts — but it also triggered a far-reaching argument over the limits of presidential power.

Most logging is banned within the monument, so increasing its boundaries by nearly 50,000 acres further reduced the federal timber supply available to the Murphy Co.’s mills in Southern Oregon.

Though the expansion was based on the president’s power to create national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906, the company filed a complaint alleging the proclamation was unconstitutional.

The lawsuit claimed the president lacked the authority to prohibit logging on public land managed under another statute, the Oregon & California Revested Lands Act of 1937, which requires a sustained level of timber harvest on roughly 2.5 million acres.

The 9th Circuit admitted the overlapping legislation “presents a statutory thicket” but rejected the argument that the two federal laws are necessarily at odds with each other.

The Murphy Co. “misses the forest for the trees” because not every acre of O&C Lands must be devoted to timber production, the ruling said. Forest stands can be spared from logging for recreation and water protection, among other purposes.

“The Antiquities Act and the later-enacted O&C Act are not irreconcilable, nor did the O&C Act repeal the Antiquities Act. The proclamation is consistent with the O&C Act’s flexible land-management directives, which incorporate conservation uses,” the ruling said.

However, that interpretation wasn’t unanimous among the three appellate judges who reviewed the case, one of whom criticized “the infirmity of the majority’s position” due to the “obvious conflict” between the laws.

“Although the Antiquities Act does grant the President broad authority to establish national monuments, nowhere does it remotely purport to grant him authority to suspend the operation of another act of Congress,” according to Circuit Court Judge Richard Tallman.

The dissenting opinion signals to the Association of O&C Counties, which is involved in the litigation, that the 9th Circuit ruling “will not be the last word on this long-running dispute,” said Robertson, the executive director.

Tallman’s dissenting opinion sided with a 2019 ruling in a parallel federal court case, which determined the presidential expansion order cannot override the congressional timber harvest mandate.

That contrary decision is being reviewed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which heard oral arguments on the case nearly six months ago.

The Association of O&C Counties challenged the national monument expansion as well as wider resource management plans restricting logging on the public lands.

”This is an issue that is essential to O&C Counties,” Robertson said.

If the D.C. appellate court affirms the ruling, it would result in the type of “circuit split” that’s often considered ripe for the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve.

Neither side in the dispute wants to upset the balance of power among the three branches of government, but they disagree over source of the threat.

The 9th Circuit’s majority opinion wants to avoid hamstringing the president’s authority — not only under the Antiquities Act, but under the O&C Act, which empowers the executive branch to decide how to manage public lands.

It’s up to the president’s Interior Department to determine which portions of O&C Lands should be harvested or preserved, the majority said.

“Obviously, Murphy can’t pick and choose which parcels should be classified as protected timberlands,” the majority decision said. “Otherwise, Murphy’s argument would place the court or the timber company in the driver’s seat and divest the department of authority to make dynamic, scientific decisions about which parcels should or should not be logged.”

Tallman’s dissenting opinion, on the other hand, sees the danger in ceding “unbridled power” to the president under the Antiquities Act.

The majority opinion lacks a “limiting principle” on the authority to designate national monuments, allowing the president to overrule public land directives set by Congress, he said.

Tallman said the implications are “sobering,” since “every federal land management law that does not expressly shield itself from the Antiquities Act is now subject to executive nullification by proclamation.”