Why Cliven Bundy Stands for the Constitution
The saga of Cliven Bundy and his disputes with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has been in the news recently, and many Oregonians cannot understand why rural folk all over the West identify with Mr. Bundy. A spokesman for his nemesis, the Center for Biological Diversity, summed up the urban case against Bundy, complaining that the BLM "is allowing a freeloading rancher and armed thugs to seize hundreds of thousands of acres of the people's land as their own fiefdom." But the Center for Biological Diversity has a proven history of lying about ranchers and grazing, and no rancher could possibly seize a vast 1,200-square-mile area of rangeland by running a few hundred cows on it.
Mr. Bundy lost all his court cases fighting the federal government, but few have bothered to explain what those cases were about. Under Nevada state law, livestock are free to wander the open range. The federal government, which acquired portions of what later became Nevada by the conquest of Mexico, decided that it didn't like Nevada's open range law and would charge for grazing. Naturally, over time, it raised the grazing fees so high as to drive most of the rangers out of business. And it began to impose absurd limitations on the number of cattle that could be grazed, ostensibly to prevent them from stepping on desert tortoises. Later, it closed the land to grazing entirely.
In truth, the federal government should not own the land at all. The United States promised, when it made Nevada a state, that it would be admitted on an equal footing with the other states. The United States also promised to sell off the remaining public lands it owned in Nevada and pay 5% of the sale proceeds to Nevada to build public roads and irrigation systems.
That was back when we still had a Constitution that operated to constrain the federal government. Under the Constitution, the only land the United States was supposed to hold for the long term was to run "Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings". Nevada has passed a statute asserting control of the public lands held in violation of this design (NRS 321.5973), but the federal courts will not give this law any effect.
That is because the United States changed its mind. Residents of Eastern states, after admission to the United States, got their own land when the federal government sold it, and then turned around and screwed their Western neighbors by stopping the sales, conduct that an 1833 Congressional report had warned would be "a most revolting breach of good faith on the part of the United States." Mr. Bundy lost his federal cases because federal judges upheld that "revolting breach of good faith".
So under modern federal law, the United States owns roughly 80% of Nevada, and its highest priority for the land Bundy and his family ranched for generations is now to protect desert tortoises. Ironically, the BLM recently announced plans to slaughter hundreds of desert tortoises it had been maintaining on funds extracted from real estate developers in Nevada. Apparently, the federal planners hadn't anticipated that the pace of development might slow. Presumably the tortoises were removed from the wild, meaning that the entire Endangered Species Act developer racket not only accomplished nothing more than paying BLM salaries, it actually increased the pressure on tortoise populations.
Bundy also tried to point out that the Endangered Species Act is obviously unconstitutional, since Congress has power to regulate interstate commerce, not wandering turtles. But the courts will not enforce that part of the Constitution either, and have allowed the Endangered Species Act to expand far from its original "Noah's Ark" mission into an expensive fraud. Here in Oregon, we shut down timber harvests based on the lie that spotted owls had to have old growth timber to survive, only to learn that we must now protect them by hiring owl assassins to kill their real enemies: competing owls with a different, barred feather pattern. The worst fraud was probably when biologists listed the Klamath River sucker fish to extract research dollars, and later claimed that Upper Klamath Lake had to be kept full to protect the suckers--even though that was when fish kills from algae growth usually happened. The sucker fraud continues, even though there are millions of suckers in lakes and ponds all over the Klamath area.
Low-information urban residents who believe the lies of the Center for Biological Diversity and its ilk are clueless about how the Endangered Species Act really works. In general, things that kill a whole lot of endangered species, like fishing for them, are allowed to continue, while things that environmentalists don't like, with only the tiniest risk of even injuring endangered species, are shut down. Rich and/or politically-connected groups can kill all the endangered species they want, but not the little people like Cliven Bundy.
So all in all, even though Cliven Bundy isn't the best poster child for a Sagebrush Rebellion, having lost his court cases and failed to pay his grazing fees, I want to recognize him for his public service in bringing these issues to public consciousness. As a Member of Congress, I would work to restore the Constitutional vision of limited federal government to return Nevada's land (and Oregon's land) back to those like Bundy with the gumption to work that land. Conservation is the wise use of natural resources, not a program to turn the rural West into a fiefdom for environmentalists.
James Buchal candidate for Congress in Portland, Oregon 2014
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