Liberty Minute April 14 2014

After a week-long standoff in the southern Nevada desert, the BLM announced that it would return cattle that had been confiscated from rancher Cliven Bundy. Mr. Bundy, whose family has operated cattle ranches in southeastern Nevada since the 1870s, insists that the federal government has no constitutional authority to own grazing lands in Clark County. For more than 20 years Bundy has refused to pay fees to the BLM, maintaining that the agency had usurped county and state authority.

Whatever else can be said about Bundy?s business practices, his constitutional analysis is unassailable.  Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution specifies and limits the purposes for which the federal government can acquire public land. There is no grant of power for Washington to claim vast expanses of territory within the western states. In spite of this, the federal government owns roughly half of the aggregate acreage in the 11 coterminous western states.

Since the 1990s, federal regulatory agencies like the BLM have been driving ranchers, loggers, miners, and other entrepreneurs from so-called ?public? lands in the name of protecting the habitat of threatened species. Cliven Bundy is the only rancher in his part of Nevada to stand up to the federal land grab. And his struggle isn?t over.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.