Armed Feds Prepare For Showdown With Nevada Cattle Rancher

[Glass]

i suspect that was just a cover story. I'll bet he stepped on the toes of one of his puppetmasters in Las Vegas. He seems to have gotten the message.

Maybe it was some gangsters that he was supposed to get some land for. They were not happy

[Tumbleweed]

Maybe it was some gangsters that he was supposed to get some land for. They were not happy

The latest attempt to take control of two million acres of land in Nevada is just another attempt of those gangsters. They probably arn't to happy with Harry for not delivering the Bundy ranch to them in the last try.

[monty]

This six part article was written May 2014. The subject of abuse be the feds should always be in the forefront of the libes of the American people.

The Bundy Standoff-A Century of Federal Abuse

THE BUNDY STANDOFF—A CENTURY OF ABUSE
PART 1

By Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D

May 17, 2014

NewsWithViews.com

Original Intent

For days following April 8, hundreds of well-armed Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and even hundreds more partially-armed Bundy supporters stood toe-to-toe. Any spark could have caused another Waco. Finally, the BLM backed off, allegedly for safety reasons. Don’t believe it. There is a much bigger story here and the media is wrong on most counts.

Most Americans have no idea that over 50 percent of the Western U.S. is owned or controlled by the federal or state governments. This creates a feudal relationship between an all-powerful government and the local landowners who must use the adjacent federal land to make a living. As with the feudal governments in Europe during the middle-ages, the land is managed for the benefit of the government, not the landowner, using a dangerous ideology called Sustainable Development. Produced by Environmental Perspectives, Inc., Bangor, ME 04401

MOST AMERICAN’S WHO LIVE EAST OF THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS, or those who live in large urban/suburban areas in the West, are surprised to learn that the federal government owns or controls over 30 percent of the land area in the United States. Most of that land is in the Western States where over 50 percent of the state is federal “public land.” Rural residents that make their living from federal lands are finding that Washington is enacting regulations that seem more intent on bankrupting them than helping them. An uninformedpopula¬tion in the East is complicit by default.

The closest form of governmentwhere the federal government dominatesthe lives of those people using federal land is feudalism/manorialism. This is a form of government whereby an all-powerful land owner, usually royalty, rents his land with restrictions and with the condition of receiving a portion of the crops or other services from the renter. Today the federal government replaces the king as the landlord. This new king serves Washington special inter¬ests, usu¬ally environ¬mentalist and inter¬national dictates, which are con¬trary to the interests of the local rancher or land user. Too often they are also contrary to actual environ¬mental health.

To understand what has happened and is happening with the Bundy Ranch it is mandatory to understand the history of American expansion westward. It may be boring for some, but unless the history is understood, numerous false assumptions and conclusions will be made. The media and bloggers have done far more harm than good in their analyses.

Original intent.

As with almost everything else that has been twisted from original intent, the Founders never intended there should be large federal landownership. When they wrote the U.S. Constitution, feudalism and manorialism Existeded in http://gold-silver.us/forum/webkit-f...73377/imagegifhttp://gold-silver.us/forum/safari-r...mages/text.gifFrance. Our Founders were eye-witnesses to the brutal treatment of the peasants under such a system. In 1783 Thomas Jefferson even went so far as to insist that all federal land should be sold as quickly as possible and, “shall never after, in any case, revert to the United States.”

To ensure that the federal govern¬ment never amassed large land holdings, our Founders allow¬ed only three forms of federal land own¬ership and jurisdic¬tion in Article I Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution: "To establish Post Offices and post Roads;" "To exercise exclusive Legislation…, over such District [of Columbia](not to exceed ten Miles square);"… " and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State…for the Erec¬tion of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, Dock Yards, and other needful buildings." (Italics added)

With these constitutional constraints, how did the federal government wind up with more than 50 percent of the land in every state west of the Rocky Mountains? Why not the East as well? Most important, what does it have to do with the Bundy ranch?
Everything.

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Map of the states and territories of the United States as it was from August 1780 to 1790. On August 7 1789 the Northwest Territory was organized. On May 26 1790, the Territory South of the Ohio River was organized.Made by Golbez.
Used under the GNU Free Documentation License

The individual states were so fearful of an all-powerful central government that they essentially gave no power to the federal government under the Articles of Confeder¬ation. The failure of the Articles led to its replacement by the U.S. Constitution of the United States in 1787. The chief failure of the Articles was, as George Washington put it so succinctly, “no money.” The federal government was deeply in debt following the Revolutionary War, but had no way under the Articles to repay it except by printing useless paper money that had no value.

To pay the debt, the states eventually ceded their state land to the federal government in a trust. The trust limited its use to that of repaying the debt. Virginia’s 1783 “Cession of Western Lands to the United States” was the first to do so. The Act stated “…that the territory so ceded shall be…formed into states,…and the States so formed shall be distinct republican States, and admitted members of the Federal Union, having the same rights of sovereignty, freedom, and independence as other States….” (Italics added)

http://gold-silver.us/forum/webkit-f...6b1bf/imagegif This was known as the “Equal Footing Doctrine,” whereby every state entered statehood on an equal footing with all states already existing.

The Equal Footing Doctrine was formalized for the entire U.S. with the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787, but only after the federal government sold the land to pay down the debt by stipulating that new states “in no case, shall interfere with the primary disposal of the soil by the united States in Congress assembled.” It also stipulated “that no tax shall be imposed on lands on the property of the United States.” However, once the population reached 60,000 people, each new state would be admitted on an “equal footing with the original States, in all respects whatever.”

This extended:

“the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, which form the basis whereon these republics, their laws and constitutions are erected; to fix and establish those principles as the basis of all laws, constitutions, and governments, which forever hereafter shall be formed in the said territory: to provide also for the establishment of States, and permanent government therein, and for their admission to a share in the federal councils on an equal footing with the original States…”

Notice that it was passed as a basic human right, not to be altered by any future legislation. Yet, it was totally ignor¬ed in the creation of states west of the Rocky Mountains. That fundamental right was codified in its entirety into the U.S. Constitution the same year. Federal lands within the territories were “trusts” that would be transferred to the state when it became a state. New states had to be given the same rights as the original statesonce they reached a population of 60,000 people. There is absolutely no Constitutional basis for “federal land ownership” on the scale of that found in the far West. None. This has a direct bearing on the Bundy Ranch case as will be discussed in Parts II and III.

Continued:

[monty]

Michael Coffman -- The Bundy Standoff-A Century of Abuse

continuation

The Northwest Ordinance also codified the principle that land ceded by the states would be used to pay the war debt and not held in perpetuity by the federal government. The Act also allowed the creation of the Northwest Terri¬tories, (now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and a portion of Minnesota) which was formally accomp¬lished in 1789.Historians consider the ordinance to be the most significant achievement under the Articles of Confederation. It set the form by which subsequent Western territories were created and later admitted into the Union as states.

Early Evolution of Land Law

Although it was fraught with controversy and power plays, all future states east of the Rocky Mountains did enter the federal Union over the next 100 years on a more or less equal footing. The federal government for the most part did not retain large blocks of land. Of the many things that happened during that period, the most notable are the Preemption Acts of 1830 and 1841, the Homestead Act of 1862 and the Act of 1866 (see sidebar).

(I was not able to include the sidebars or the map.)

The mid 1800s created chaos in Western policy as the tension, and then Civil War between the North and South resulted in turbulent allegiances and politics. The Mexican War also occurred during the mid-1800s and was ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Part of the settlement in the treaty required Mexico to cede all its territory to the U.S. from Texas to Colorado and westward to the Pacific. Most importantly, Article VIII of the treaty clearly stated:

Mexicans now established in territories previously belonging to Mexico, and which remain for the future within the limits of the United States, as defined by the present treaty, shall be free to continue where they now reside, or to remove at any time to the Mexican Republic, retaining the property which they possess in the said territories, or disposing thereof, and removing the proceeds wherever they please, without their being subjected, on this account, to any contribution, tax, or charge whatever.

The word Mexicans in Article VIII also included Americans. The conditions of the treaty stipulated, without exception, that the U.S. honor any and all property rights granted to the residents of the newly created U.S. territory. This included all types of property rights, especially water and grazing. By this time, much of it was already settled, including timber rights in the forested area. Since the treaty closely paralleled the Preemption Act of 1841, few people paid attention to it. Also, since the federal government did not set up administrative units in the territory for years, the ranchers, timber barons and others continued to do what they had always done.

Growing a crop to harvest was very problem¬atic. If the rancher’s 160 acres contained a perennial stream, the owner could perhaps irrigate; if able to afford the equipment. Few could. Because life was so hard, a majority of Homesteads fell victim to speculators who bought the land at steeply discounted prices.

The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 increased the acreage of the homestead to 320 acres. This gave most homesteads east of the Rocky Mountains sufficient acreage for marginal dry-land farming. If the 320 acre homestead had water, a small herd of livestock could even be raised. The 1916 Stock-Raising Homestead Act increased the acreage once again to 640 acres for ranching purposes. With these three Acts, most of the land east of the Rockies was quickly settled by homesteaders and very little land remained as Public Domain. However, the three Acts still did not provide sufficient acreage for arid homesteading west of the Rockies so most land remained in the Public Domain.

Ranchers owning homesteads west of the Rockies had another problem. Not only did they need water for their livestock, the parched land would not support much forage for grazing. They required thousands of acres to graze a herd large enough to sustain a family in even marginal comfort. The answer was Preemptive Rights of Appropriation, where the rancher used his or her homestead as a base and grazed his cattle on public land called open range (without fences). They could use, but not own the public land. The open range led to bitter range wars when one homesteader/owner’s livestock grazing encroached upon another.

Since water was life in the west, water wars were also common. They were a type of range war whereby one homesteader would dam up a creek, usually for watering livestock, thereby denying water to downstream homesteaders. Even without these conflicts, water was extremely precious, perhaps more so than gold. Ranchers built ditches, water tanks were dug and seeps enlarged. Often these were on public lands upon which the cattle and sheep were grazed. The more water that could be developed, the more livestock that could be grazed; limited only by the forage produced.

This use of water on public land evolved into a property right that was codified by Congress as a “pre-existing right of possession” by a law, simply labeled the Act of 1866. This Act started what is known as the “split estate” in which one owner, the federal government in this case, owns the land and another owner, the homesteader, owns the mineral, grazing and/or water rights. The Act gave mineral rights to those miners actively mining the public lands and water rights to ranchers actively grazing the public lands. All other mineral and water rights remained with the federal government. These water and mineral rights were strengthened by the Act of 1870 and especially by the Desert Land Act of 1877.

This provides some of the legal ground on which Bundy makes his case. But he made it to the wrong court. Although the U.S. District Court which ruled against Bundy, does have jurisdiction, itrules on administrative, civil and criminal law, not specifically Constitutional law. As detailed in Part II, rarely does the District Court use the U.S. Constitution in deciding a case, even though it should. In other words, since the BLM followed the laws governing the BLM and case law, Bundy lost. That’s why most ranchers lose in District Court. The fact that Bundy lost in District Court is almost constitutionally meaningless in understanding the issue.

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The media, for the most part has incorrectly used the District Court cases as hard-core evidence that Bundy was wrong. That does not make him wrong constitutionally.It is likely he will now sue in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims which hears claims for monetary damages that arise from the United States Constitution, federal statutes, executive regulations, or an express or implied in fact contract with the United States Government. As explained in Part VI, this lawsuit will probably have an entirely different outcome than in the U.S. District Court.

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This admittedly abbreviated and simplified history glosses over the messiness and even lawlessness of the process. In retrospect the Preemption and homestead laws didn’t really work as intended. Most of the homesteads failed, and unscrupulous speculators greatly profited at the expense of the homesteaders. Yet, some homesteaders did succeed. More importantly the land shifted from public to private ownership where it would eventually become the “breadbasket of the world.”

Fortunately for the world, land east of the Rocky Mountains has very little federal land today because of federal policy and constitutional restrictions based on the Equal Footing doctrine of the Northwest Ordinance. What happened to radically change well-established Constitutional law? Two new unconstitutional laws in the late 1800s radically changed the public land west of the Rockies by keeping it in the hands of the federal government. That change was destined to become a disaster for people who had to make a living from that land.

Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3,

© 2014 Michael Coffman - All Rights Reserved

Footnotes:

1. Feudalism was the political, economic, and military system of the middle ages. It involved the bequeathing of land and protection from kings down to nobles, down to knights, and down to the peasants, who could own no property and were at the mercy of the nobility. Manorialism refers to the economic system on a fief, either part of the fief or the whole as a manor - a self-sufficient, isolated village.

http://www.newswithviews.com/Coffman/mike147.htm

[monty]

http://www.americaplundered.com/images/FedLndOwn.jpg

[monty]

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[palani]

The last Nevada rancher who won big time in the Court of Federal Claims did so post posthumously. It is possible to win but less likely this occurs during your own lifetime.

[monty]

The last Nevada rancher who won big time in the Court of Federal Claims did so post posthumously. It is possible to win but less likely this occurs during your own lifetime.

Quoted for trurh.

[monty]

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[monty]

THE BUNDY STANDOFF—A CENTURY OF ABUSE
PART 2

By Michael S. Coffman, Ph.D
May 29, 2014
NewsWithViews.com

Part II—Unconstitutional Deviance and the U.S. War on the West

After rapid Western Expansion to the Rocky Mountains in the nineteenth century, the United States suddenly reversed its land disposal policy by not ceding its public lands to the states, ignoring 100 years of well-established law and constitutional limitation. U.S. District Courts stopped using constitutional law and started using case law, opening the law to judicial corruption. This policy change was driven by progressive northeastern financiers and industrialists committed to take the West for their own benefit.

HUMAN NATURE DICTATES that if no one is legally responsible for something, people who benefit from using that something will tend to do whatever is fast and cheap to get what they want. That’s true for anything. Natural resources are no exception. Without any oversight, it was not long before Western mining and timber companies were causing harm to the resource base on public lands in the late 1800s. Progressives of the day used the exaggerated writings of naturalists like John Muir to enrage Eastern audiences to the alleged destruction. Just as they do today, an ill-informed population demanded it be stopped.

Indeed, something had to be done. The government could have just deeded the land to the ranchers, timber and mining companies as a Preemption Right as they had done east of the Rocky Mountains. However, giving the huge areas of arid range and forest land needed to maintain economic viability to http://www.newswithviews.com/Coffman/images/Text1.gifindividual ranchers and timber companies stuck in the craw of Easterners, especially the progressives of the day. Besides, it was argued that the preemption and homestead laws had failed to accomplish their intended purpose. Instead of being settled by long-term farmers and ranchers, the 160 acre homesteads were too small to be economically viable and most homesteaders sold out to speculators.

Little did that generation know that the seeming failure of the Preemption and Homestead Acts would eventually provide the greatest blessing the world has ever known as the Midwest became known as the bread basket of the world. At the time, however, the program seemed to have failed. That was the reason Congress revoked the preemption laws and kept the land by passing the Forest Reserve and General Revision Acts of 1891. In doing so, Congress violated the U.S. Constitution.

Article IV, Section 3, paragraph 2 of the Constitution gives Congress the “power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the Territory or other property belonging to the United States.” It dealt with territories, not states. Conversely, as discussed in Part I, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution severely limits the type of land the federal government can actually own to federal highways, the District of Columbia and, with the consent of the state legislature of “Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, Dock-Yards, and other needful buildings.”

Obviously, most of the nearly 650 million acres now allegedly“owned” by the federal government west of the Rockies do not qualify constitutionally. True, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded the land to the U.S. government in 1948. However, most of that land was already given by Mexican grants to settlers, mining companies or timber companies as working land. These settlers were protected with strong property rights language in Section VIII of the treaty.

According to the Equal Footing Doctrine those rights should have been kept by the landowners when the territories became states. The U.S. government did recognize these property rights – except when it didn’t. The U.S. government ignored the treaty when it served the purpose of the unscrupulous politicians, bureaucrats and industrial tycoons. The convoluted history of what happened from 1848 through the early 1900s is a book in itself.

The foundational basis in deciding the legal ownership rests on two concrete facts:1) the U.S. cannot “own” this land constitutionally, even though it claims it does. Upon entering the United States the new western state should have been given land not claimed by the settlers. They were not. 2) The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which is a constitutional instrument should have protected the settlers’ vested property rights. It did not.

On the other side of the issue, many property rights activists claim that since the federal government has no deed to the land, the government therefore has no rights. That’s true to a point. However, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is the “deed.” The treaty gave the U.S. certain surface and sometimes mineral rights, often on the same land owned by the settlers. The Act of 1866 (see Part I) attempted to sort out the split estate concept with important but somewhat mixed results.

Congress passed the Organic Act of 1897, establishing “science-based” forest and range management guidelines and the use of grazing permits and fees for the newly minted forest reserves that were created in 1891. Scientific range management would morph in the later 1900s into the tool by which political objectives would be reached. The Transfer Act of 1905 created the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) within the Department of Agriculture. The Weeks Act (also known as the Organic Act) of 1911 allowed the USFS to purchase and create additional National Forests in the East.

The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 established prior rights for the ranchers and eventually allowed the conversion of the old General Land Office in the Department of Interior into the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Together the USFS and BLM today employ about 40,000 people who manage 446 million acres at a cost of over $7 billion a year. Totally, the U.S. controls over 30 percent of the U.S., amounting to over 50 percent of every state west of the Rocky Mountains. (See map)

As will be discussed in Parts III-VI, an incredible war between the federal government and western ranchers has been going on since 1891 mostly under the radar; pushed and funded by powerful northeastern progressive financiers and industrialists. What’s happening to Cliven Bundy and other ranchers is the result of that war. Central to what is happening today was the deliberate conversion of Constitutional law into case law in the courts, as Bundy and hundreds of thousands of Americans have found out the hard way. It has led to a very corrupted legal system that tragically has no fidelity to the restrictions imposed by the U.S. Constitution.

Constitutional Law vs. Case Law

Although most American’s are not even aware of it, courts no longer use Constitutional law in deciding cases. They now use case law. That wasn’t always the case. In fact, Constitutional law and principles were part of the early education of children. French judge, statesman and political writer Alexis de Tocqueville observed a phenomenal thing in Volume II of his Democracy in America when he visited America in 1831:

If you question [an American] respecting his own country…he will inform you what his rights are and by what means he exercises them…. You will find that he is familiar with the mechanism of the laws…. The American learns to know the laws by participating in the act of legislation…. The great work of society is ever going on before his eyes, and, as it were, under his hands. In the United States, politics are the end and aim of education.

The concept of “natural” sovereignty of citizens over the state was the foundation of the U.S. Constitution and culture of the United States. It created the “American Way” which was unique in the history of mankind. In early America, Constitutional law and these principles were taught in school. They were so strong and generally known by every American that they quickly extinguished the early attempts by progressives that the state is sovereign over the citizen. Today, most Americans commonly believe that the federal government is sovereign over the state, the state over the local government, and the local government over the citizen. That is opposite of what the U.S. Constitution actually says and will create tyranny eventually. Americans are blind with ignorance of their heritage and liberties. Today, not even attorneys know what the average American knew in the 1800s.

However, a group of men who coveted power gradually introduced the statistinto the American education system. They had a goal; the same goal that megalomaniacs have had throughout history—to rule the world.

These would-be rulers knew they could never attain that goal as long as the people understood the U.S. Constitution and the principles upon which it stood. As students of history, they knew that nations ruled by the statist model were populated by citizens who could be easily manipulated to do what the rulers wanted. After all, socialism and communism train people from early childhood to obey the all-knowing government—the source of all power. Tragically, they have instilled this goal for several generations in America’s public school system.

Widespread constitutional understanding began to diminish in the late nineteenth century when Christopher Langdell was hired by Harvard University in the mid-1800s expressly to change the direction of the highly influential Harvard Law School. Simultaneously, progressives were first attempting to weaken the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution to mean anything they wanted. It wouldn’t be called a “living document” in its modern form until Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke of the concept, if not the actual phrase.

Prior to Langdell, law schools taught law by lecturing from the Constitution and law itself. When Langdell became Dean of the Harvard Law School, he taught law by reviewing previous case law. In doing so the Constitution and the actual legislated law was ignored. By the twentieth century, the case law approach was adopted by all U.S. law schools. U.S. District Court cases were no longer decided by the U.S. Constitution or the written law, but by previous cases. By incrementally making small changes in lawsuits, each successive decision can actually reverse the original intent of the U.S. Constitution or legislated law. It is legislation from the bench.

No longer were students forced to dig into constitutional wording and intent, but instead were taught how appellate courts ruled in specific cases. Although the District Court can use the U.S. Constitution and the actual law, it rarely does. Often it is because the attorney representing the rancher or citizen has never been taught real constitutional law. Tragically, actual teaching of the Constitution in law schools is almost nonexistent today. This is not an exaggeration. In the case of Bundy, revisionist case law was applied by an agenda driven and arrogant BLM to put Bundy’s fellow ranchers out of business.

At the risk of oversimplification, if it were not for the Forest Reserve and General Revision Acts of 1891, and revisionist case law, much, if not most of this USFS/BLM land and its associated management costs would now be in private or state ownership. There wouldn’t be a war on ranchers and other natural resource users because there would have been no power for radical environmentalists and agency bureaucrats to create the growing evil they have inflicted over the past 60 years.

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The accusation by environmentalists and federal agencies that private owners would have destroyed these vast tracts of lands is totally unjustified. While it may have been true with open un-owned range, history has clearly shown that once a resource is in private hands, management quality will generally increase because of self-interest and the need to protect the resource for future income. The deterioration of forests and rangelands managed by the USFS and BLM today is a tragic testament to what happens with public ownership subject to special interest political pressure.

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So is Bundy right or wrong? Constitutionally, he seems to be right, but case law says he isn’t. That may change. Bundy now has standing in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. This little known court is focused on deciding constitution-based lawsuits, not administrative lawsuits. Bundy gained standing when the BLM confiscated his cattle, destroyed his water troughs and corrals, and then deliberately killed several head of cattle, including two of his breeding bulls. Those are within his century-old property rights granted by the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo. If he can get the financial support, he may actually win on a constitutional basis. It will be interesting. For part one click below.

Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3,

© 2014 Michael Coffman - All Rights Reserved

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