The House Natural Resources Committee's top Democrat is slamming committee Chairman Rob Bishop for calling President Obama's Friday designation of new national monuments "bull crap."

The ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, said House Democrats want to preserve antiquity, while "House Republicans want them to become extinct."

Grijalva was responding to comments by Bishop, a Utah Republican, who told the news service Greenwire after the president's announcement, "There is nothing that Obama did today that had anything to do with an antiquity."

"Ah, bull crap. That's not an antiquity," Bishop was reported as saying, in response to what he considers the president's misinterpretation and misuse of the 1906 Antiquities Act. He was responding specifically to a site in Nevada that contains cave paintings, according to Greenwire.

"There are criteria for using the act. There is nothing Obama announced that had anything to do with the criteria," Bishop said.

Grijalva said the "natural and cultural resources" that the president chose to protect under these designations "are, in fact, antiques" under the law. The "species and trees and rocks and cave paintings and beautiful landscapes are all quite old. We want them to remain antique," he added.

Obama established three new national monuments under the 1906 Antiquities Act on Friday: The Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument in California, Waco Mammoth National Monument in Texas, and the Basin and Range National Monument in Nevada.

Bishop called the designation a "shameful power" grab, demonstrating the lengths the federal government will go to acquire new lands. "I condemn this shameful power move, which makes states and citizens fearful that the federal government can invade at any time to seize more lands like bandits in the night," he said.

Friday's announcement would "unilaterally designate more than one million acres" as national monuments, according to Bishop's office. That makes for six monument designations this year, and 19 since President Obama took office.