Posted on 03/06/2016 2:56:33 AM PST by Nextrush
At 0:00 TED CRUZ: Too much land in this country particularly in the West is owned by the federal government. It's not right, it doesn't make sense and we need to transfer that land back to the states or even better back to the people. It should, the people of Idaho know much better what to do with the land here than does the federal government. There's no reason for the federal government to be the largest land owner in this country.
You know, in my home state of Texas, two percent of the state is owned by the federal government. I gotta tell you in Texas we think that's two percent too much. It doesn't make any sense at all.....the Eastern part of the country, that's not the case, the federal government doesn't own the majority of the land in the East, but the West when states joined the Union, they found themselves in a situation where the federal government took control of far too much land and I think we need to give it back to the states.......
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
“I might also go one step further...offering 300-acre allotments to individuals who can prove their one-hundred percent Indian status.”
There is no such thing anymore as 100% Indian.
This issue is important. Federal land grabs give power not only to the Federal Government, but to the Executive Branch in particular. It’s part of how we end up with Clintons and Obamas.
It’s imminent domain on steroids, with no public purpose, only a federal government centralist purpose .States’ rights will never be truly restored until these lands are returned to the states. The people within those states could then decide to “protect” or sell off to private interests. It’s disenfranchisement in the extreme.
The grabs are always a sop to the environmentalists, and, as such, part of the liberal war on capitalism. There’s more than meets the eye on this issue.
Interesting, pepsionice. Put me down for Area 51.
On a more serious note, though.
There is very little (if anything) that would NOT be improved by less gubbmint. That includes land ownership.
The social-progressive movement that spawned the outrageous Fed land grabs over the years is the same (bowel) movement that gave us the EPA, Dept of Energy, Dept of (dis)Education, Dept of Commerce, and all the other anti-Constitutional crap that has emanated from DC over the last 100+ years.
The strict language of the Constitution regarding land ownership must be reclaimed and enforced, vigorously.
That's not how it happened. In the early federal period, the original 13 states ceded their western land claims, inherited from old British land grants, to the federal government. At a stroke, everything west of the crest of the Appalachians became federal land. Then came the Louisiana Purchase, the purchase of Florida from Spain, the seizure of the Southwest after the Mexican War, and the purchase of Alaska. All of this was originally federal estate. The exceptions to the pattern were Texas and Hawaii, both independent republics before entering the Union. (This is why Ted Cruz is able to boast about how little of Texas is federally owned. I expect the Gadsden Purchase is the exception in Texas.)
Until the latter part of the 19th century, land privatization was an explicit policy objective. Most of it was sold off to accommodate yeoman agriculture. By the latter part of the 19th century, however, as settlement moved into the semi-aird, arid, and mountainous parts of the West, the land was unsuited for small scale farming. Grazing, timber, and mining rights were much more important, and the scale was much larger. Privatizing land for 160 acre farms under the Homestead Act was one thing. Granting (or selling for a song) hundreds of thousands of acres to cattle barons and mining companies was another. I am not an expert in the period, but I do not get the impression that Congress in the 1880's was intent on creating a permanent federal estate in the West. It was just that Congress balked at giving away huge tracts to well-connected private interests. Think of it as an anti-crony capitalism, anti-corruption response.
Since that time, until fairly recently, these federal lands in the West, outside of the National Parks, have been managed mostly for sustainable yield and multiple use purposes. What has happened in the last 20 years or so, of course, is that the environmentalist radicals have turned against multiple use and are demanding ever-more exclusionary management. This is causing BLM and the Forest Service to constrict or withdraw entirely from the longstanding partnerships they have had with ranchers and the mining and timber industries in the western states. This is what is causing the current heartburn.
The fact that we had huge tracts of federal land in the west in the late 19th and early 20th centuries allowed us to create a number of magnificent national parks, unrivaled anywhere in the world. This is all to the good. But apart from the national parks, I agree that the feds own too much land in the west, and that a significant percentage should be transferred to the states or privatized. But at the same time, the eastern states urgently need expanded parks and wildlife refuges, especially since we are apparently determined to continue doubling the population every 50 years. I would propose using the proceeds from western land privatization to fund eastern park expansion.
Eastern and western parks are very different in character. The east is already relatively densely settled, and land is inherently more valuable. There is no prospect of assembling anything like Yellowstone or Yosemite in the east. There is enormous opportunity and need, however, if we start with historic sites and historic landscapes, and think in terms of greenbelts, buffer zones, and agricultural and forest preserves to limit the sprawl of the eastern megalopolis. National parks are just one part of the puzzle, but they are locally important. It is insane, for example, to pave over another Civil War battlefield to build yet another set of suburbs, office parks, and malls indistinguishable from the band of suburbs, office parks, and malls stretching for 300 miles north and south.
Apart from the historic sites, floodplains, wetlands, and barrier islands are targets of opportunity. I don't care whether the feds, the states, or private interests own the barrier islands, for example, but I do think we should stop paying to rebuild them after each big hurricane. We can start turning the screws harder on floodplains as well. The Ninth Ward in New Orleans isn't the only neighborhood that should have been reclaimed by nature years ago.
The National Park Service has an institutional bias towards the big western parks. The NPS attracts a lot of very fine people who want to work in the big outdoors out west. (It also attracts very fine historians who want to work the cannonball circuit, but they are badly outnumbered in the NPS.) The NPS also finds it easier to manage a smaller number of big parks than a larger number of small, scattered holdings. And I am happy to agree that the NPS may not necessarily be the best entity to manage many of these sites. There is ample room for federal cooperation with states, local governments, and private groups to preserve key sites. I don't really care who owns it, as long as historically significant land is preserved, and there is reasonable public access.
In the case of Bundy it didn't seem that the issue was federal ownership of the land. It's that they deprived cattle ranchers of their long-standing access to it.
You are correct, that section assumes the state is already a state, otherwise the land could not have been bought from it by the feds in the first place.
The question then is, what does the Constitution say concerning how States get created and added?
Did it have provisions for territories being created first, and then States?
And how is it that the Midwest States, from Oklahoma up to the Dakotas, have less percentage of federally owned land than the States to the west of them?
(Texas was its own nation, thus the tiny percentage of fed owned land there)
Allow individual States to take back ownership, and it would remain public lands.
Then each individual State population would decide how best to maintain it, but it would necessarily need to remain the property of the public.
It doesn’t seem to affect your home state of Massachusetts much but I think the western States might have a gripe.
That would be Article IV, Section 3.
Did it have provisions for territories being created first, and then States?
Yes. "The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property belonging to the United States; and nothing in this Constitution shall be so construed as to prejudice any claims of the United States, or of any particular state."
And how is it that the Midwest States, from Oklahoma up to the Dakotas, have less percentage of federally owned land than the States to the west of them?
To answer that I would suggest you read up on the Northwest Ordinance, Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican American War, the Gadsden Purchase and the purchase of Alaska.
Washington, of course, is an outlier in terms of the abundance of history and pre-existing federal presence, but sites such as these exist in many places around the country. Instead of the feds acquiring more land out west to add buffer zones to buffer zones to buffer zones, I'd like to see the NPS refocus on smaller, local sites in the east. Whether the site is managed in the long run by the NPS or a local government or private entity is secondary.
As a political matter, I think conservatives need to balance the push for western land preservation with a positive emphasis on local and community parks.
This is such an important issue and I wish other candidates would have given it some thought.
Aside from military bases and office buildings, the federal government has no business owning vast swaths of land. This land should be returned to the states, and preferably if possible granted to private US citizens. There should be some mechanism in place preventing its re-sale to non-citizens.
BLM should be divided up and handed off to the individual states; it would be up to the states then to either hire them or eliminate them as an agency. Maybe Border Patrol could hire them.
Yes, bankruptcy would certainly put them in a precarious position requiring a continuation of bad policy that led up to the crisis.
I believe the federally controlled land was a condition of statehood for most western states. It seemed not to have occurred to the Feds, or was deemed inappropriate, prior to around 1850.
As an aside, the admission of states is another example of Congress authorizing the President to negotiate agreements in behalf of Congress.
I think a distinction can be made between BLM lands, for instance, which are the vast majority of public lands, and park lands, cemeteries, historical properties, and such.
National forests could be kept intact, controlled by the individual states. BLM lands could be simply sold or granted by lottery though I would limit the buyers to US citizens only for a couple of generations.
“He is right but while Texas may have kept the feds off their land they sure have let in a lot of muzzies.”
How, under current law, could Texas possibly keep them out?
I think they can’t give it back to the states because it’s been pledged as collateral to foreign governments in the event we default on our debt.
In OH you have some crazy people who won't be happy until every square foot of Cuyahoga County is paved, and pols owned by them. People are FINALLY waking up....a little.
http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/blm_special_areas/NLCS/monuments.html
I get nitpicky about this because an overbroad generalization leaves us open to the charge that we would privatize land that most people consider part of the "crown jewels" estate. We have to be careful to emphasize that we are talking about lands that have historically been used for economic purposes, and that will continue to be used responsibly.
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