WASHINGTON — When it comes to getting around Congress, President Obama may not be able to move mountains — but he can rename them.
The Obama administration's decision to rename North America's tallest peak to its original native name of Denali is drawing protests from Republican lawmakers in Ohio.
That's because the mountain's previous namesake, President William McKinley, was also a Republican from Ohio.
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Obama to rename nation's tallest mountain
"This decision by the administration is yet another example of the President going around Congress," Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said, noting that Congress had been debating the name for years.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a Republican presidential candidate, said Obama "overstepped his bounds."
Rep. Bob Gibbs, R-Ohio, went even further, calling it another example of Obama's "constitutional overreach."
"President Obama has decided to ignore an act of Congress in unilaterally renaming Mount McKinley in order to promote his job-killing war on energy," Gibbs said in a tweeted statement Sunday. "This political stunt is insulting to all Ohioans."
Obama timed the announcement to coincide with a three-day trip to Alaska to highlight the problem of climate change in the Arctic. But the dispute over the name goes back decades.
The 20,237-foot mountain was originally known as Denali, which means "the great one" in the Athabascan language of the original Alaskans. But that began to change when European-American prospectors and explorers arrived. A Seattle man, William Dickey,rediscovered the mountain in 1896 while prospecting for gold.
"We named our great peak Mount McKinley, after William McKinley of Ohio, who had been nominated for the presidency,and that fact was the first news we received on our way out of that wonderful wilderness," he wrote in a dispatch to the New York Sun.
McKinley was not yet president then, and the naming may have been a political stunt in itself: McKinley, in running against the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, favored the gold standard to back U.S. dollars.
That name was formalized in 1917 when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Mount McKinley National Park Act, which required the park to be "dedicated and set apart as a public park for the benefit and enjoyment of the people under the name of the Mount McKinley National Park."
But another law passed in 1947 gives the Secretary of the Interior and the Board on Geographic Names the power to "provide for uniformity in geographic nomenclature and orthography throughout the federal government."
The Alaska government first petitioned the Interior Department to change the name to Denali in 1975. But because the Board on Geographic Names deferred to Congress if a name was under consideration by lawmakers, the Ohio delegation was able to prevent a name change for four decades simply by introducing bills to keep the McKinley name — even if those bills never passed.
Friday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said that impasse had gone on long enough. In her order issued Friday, she noted that McKinley never stepped foot in Alaska.
Still, House Speaker John Boehner, who hails from the opposite corner of Ohio, said he was "disappointed" in the decision.
"There is a reason President McKinley’s name has served atop the highest peak in North America for more than 100 years, and that is because it is a testament to his great legacy," Boehner said in a statement.
He recited McKinley's record, which included service in the Union Army in the Civil War, elections to the House of Representatives and to the Ohio governorship. "And he led this nation to prosperity and victory in the Spanish-American War as the 25th President of the United States," Boehner said.
It's unclear what the Ohioans can do about the decision. Gibbs said he would would work to overturn the decision legislatively; Portman said he would ask the National Park Service to find a way to "preserve McKinley's legacy somewhere else in the national park that once bore his name."
The issue is not strictly a partisan one. Ohio Democrats, too, have introduced bills over the years to retain the McKinley name.
And Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska — while critical of Obama on energy policy — praised the decision to rename the mountain. “For centuries, Alaskans have known this majestic mountain as the ‘great one,’" she said in a statement Sunday. "I’d like to thank the President for working with us to achieve this significant change to show honor, respect, and gratitude to the Athabascan people of Alaska."