What statute can you cite for your claim? How do you know this rancher's rights weren't grandfathered from a time long before the existence of the BLM and that what the gov't has done here essentially constitutes a taking?
FReegards!
It is because he did not pay his bills. He does not have the right to use public land for grazing without the fee just because his family did in 1884.
Do you work for BLM in Nevada, unbelievable.
Meanwhile, a solar energy project bulldozed turtle habitat, is frying birds in flight, and oh so politically correct windmills chop up eagles and other protected birds by the hundreds.
When the BLM is done there will be a shortage of sand in this desert. The Bundy family chose not to buy their chains.
That's the government/media narrative. Why do you automatically believe them?
/johnny
“It is because he did not pay his bills.”
This is not what I’ve read. He tried to pay his bills, but the BLM would not take his payments. He then tried to get the state to take his payments and hold them for the BLM, but the state didn’t want to be involved. Only then did he stop paying. I wish I could link you to where I’d read that, but I’ve read so many articles on this story, that I don’t know where to look .
Public land? He is part of that public. It is public, not federal land...the government has no right to claim it.
Exactly. Whatever his disputes were with BLM management, he should have continued paying the fees.
Which isn’t to say BLM is correct in their management, as they are generally pwned by the ecofreak, earth mother luddites. They probably were trying to manage Bundy into bankruptcy.
But not paying the fees put him on the wrong side of the law and lets BLM legally strong arm him off the land.
He had 1,000 head of cattle. not huge by western rancher standards. In 1993, he was told by BLM he could no longer graze all of his cattle—just 150 of them in the same area, and he has disputed the numbers and charges for those numbers since. A big part of what the BLM says he owes is back fees on the “undocumented cattle” he ran there.
The whole thing is about federal over-reach, pure and simple.
What statute can you cite for your claim? How do you know this rancher's rights weren't grandfathered from a time long before the existence of the BLM and that what the gov't has done here essentially constitutes a taking?
FReegards!
It sounds like this rancher's original beef (pun intended) was that he felt his grazing fees weren't being used to his benefit. His mistake was diverging from that legal argument and going down a path of challenging BLM's statutory authority to administer those lands. That is a losing argument.
The family has done a good job of framing the argument as the poor rancher trying to fight the evil government, but that will only last so long.
The US govt is not supposed to be holding ownership of land in the states except for a very precise set of reasons. Grazing cattle isn’t one of them nor is oil and gas leasing. So Bundy has more of an argument than the govt
They weren’t charges they were penalties and he tried to pay them but to locals rather than federal agents. The locals refused the money.
What if your landlord slashed your tires on your way to the bank to pay?