American citizens are sick of the federal bullies. Clive Bundy, the Nevada rancher who is standing up to the government’s land grab, is getting more support from citizen militias, GOP/Libertarian politicians, and people across the U.S.
Corrupt authoritarian Harry Reid is lobbing more threats:
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says “something is going to happen” to get Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy to stop letting his cattle graze on federal land.
“It’s obvious that you can’t just walk away from this. And we can speculate all we want to speculate to what’s going to happen next,” Reid told KSNV-TV. “But I don’t think it’s going to be tomorrow that something is going to happen, but something will happen. We are a nation of laws, not of men and women.”
Hopefully ‘something’ will happen to stop Harry Reid.
In the meantime, Texas, another western state dominated by the federal control of public land, has raised its own red flag about possible BLM land grabs:
Texas officials are raising alarm that the Bureau of Land Management, on the heels of its dust-up with Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, might be eyeing a massive land grab in northern Texas.
The under-the-radar issue has caught the attention of Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who fired off a letter on Tuesday to BLM Director Neil Kornze saying the agency “appears to be threatening” the private property rights of “hard-working Texans.”
……At issue are thousands of acres of land on the Texas side of the Red River, along the border between Texas and Oklahoma. Officials recently have raised concern that the BLM might be looking at claiming 90,000 acres of land as part of the public domain.
The agency, though, argues that any land in question was long ago determined to be public property.
……According to background materials put out by Texas Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry’s office, the BLM is revisiting its management plan for lands including those along a 116-mile stretch of the Red River. His office said the possibility has been discussed of opening that land up for “hunting, recreation and management.”
Sid Miller, former Texas State Representative and Republican candidate for Texas Agriculture Commissioner, has since made the matter a campaign issue to Breitbart Texas.
“In Texas,” Miller says, “the BLM is attempting a repeat of an action taken over 30 years ago along the Red River when Tommy Henderson lost a federal lawsuit. The Bureau of Land Management took 140 acres of his property and didn’t pay him one cent.”
Miller referred to a 1986 case where the BLM attempted to seize some of Henderson’s land. Henderson sued the BLM and lost 140 acres that had been in his family for generations. Now the BLM is looking at using the prior case as a precedent to claim an additional 90,000 acres.
Adding insult to injury, the BLM thugs killed the cattle it rustled from Bundy’s ranch.
An article at Reason.com, points out that the battle between the western states and the federal government over land is about more than just Bundy’s rights:
The recent face-off between the Bundy family and its supporters on the one hand, and the Bureau of Land Management and its enablers on the other, is hardly the first word in the tussle between westerners and the federal government over control of land. The battle has probably been inevitable since western settlers ceded control of the lion’s share of the open spaces around them to distant Washington, D.C. in return for admission to the union. Now, those spaces aren’t quite so open, and their inhabitants are more assertive—and see themselves (often with good reason) as better stewards of their turf than distant officials who seem to pride themselves on inefficiency and lousy accounting practices.
……Utah State Rep. Ken Ivory (R-West Jordan) told Reason Foundation’s Leonard Gilroy:
“In the 2011 session—when we realized that over $5 billion of our state revenue comes from a federal government that’s broke—that’s when we started to flesh out how serious those numbers were. Something on the order of 40% of our state revenue comes from an unsustainable source in our federal governing partner. We looked at the magnitude of this risk and started to think about how we could broaden our revenue base and get to a point of economic self-reliance.”
Controlling the land and resources is a big step in that direction.
The “Legislative Summit on the Transfer of Public Lands,” gathering representatives from nine western states in Salt Lake City, was organized by Ivory and borrows its terminology from that Utah move, showing that concerns about reducing financial reliance on the feds and gaining local control are spreading. Planning for the conference predates the Bundy standoff and the gathering addresses broader issues—but it certainly got a nudge from headlines and tense video of federal agents facing off with locals over land use.
So, what started as a simmering problem over the control of land and resources has only been fueled by the growing prosperity and sophistication of westerners. They see little reason to leave their fate in the hands of a stumbling federal government that can’t balance its books.
It boils down to States’ rights versus an out-of-control, incompetent, criminally negligent federal government that seized control of vast amounts of land, for reasons that had little to do with the public good.
More observations from Dr. Ben Carson:
It is quite interesting to see, though, that the same bureaucrats refuse to enforce some of our federal border-protection laws and other domestic policies with which they disagree. Perhaps Mr. Reid’s time could be better spent explaining why it is acceptable for the federal government to pick and choose which laws it wishes to enforce.
The senator readily referred to the Bundys and their supporters as “domestic terrorists,” but the current administration is reticent about applying the same term to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, who admitted slaughtering more than a dozen people in 2009 at Fort Hood in Texas. What does this tell us about our government and its perceptions and alignments?
The massive show of federal force in the Bundy case is frightening because it gives us a brief glimpse of the totalitarian regime that awaits a sleeping populace that does not take seriously its voting responsibilities, and places in public office (and returns them to office) who do not represent traditional American values.
Related post:
Reblogged this on Rowan Oath Keepers.