Posted on 04/16/2014 10:09:55 AM PDT by Duke C.
[snip]“I asked why you didn’t put a lien against the cattle?” Devlin asked the BLM. “They hadn’t thought about that but they are considering it now”
(Excerpt) Read more at benswann.com ...
Thre are a lot of pieces to this. You need the family history to start.
How about “adverse possession” of the land as a Bundy defense?
That’s what these prescriptive rights sound like.
Id say that should they be foolish to NOW put a lien against the cattle....they MIGHT JUST BE LIABLE for damages as per their inane RAID and confiscation.
Whoa. they didn’t “think about it”?
So their first thought was, “Hey, let’s spend about $2M arming a bunch of thugs and use a bunch of helicopter hours so we can show how disgusting we are.....in order to get $1M in fines” ???
And, no one at BLM, had a different - and less expensive and confrontational - idea?
Shut it down. Just shut it down.
The Bundy’s have been ranching that land since 1870.
IMO the land they have been grazing cattle on for over a century should belong to them.
The feds will get what they want. If they can’t directly get the property they will send in the environazi shock troops that find, suddenly, the land is the only habitat in the world for a turtle. Environazis didn’t like farmers in the Central Valley of California so they found a mouse that ONLY lives on the most fertile farmland. The feds wanted the water so they found a delta smelt in a river. The feds wanted some beach front property so they declared it a critical habitat wetland and kicked off the oyster farmers. It’s good to see people stand up to the thuggery of the feds in the Bundy case but don’t know where this goes from now.
That being said I have no doubt the same blood thirsty quest for power that motivated Pol Pot flows through Obama. If we didn’t have guns he would have no problem setting the goons on all of us. None.
A lot of people are asking this now. But BLM’s first response was a show of force. Threat under a gun. Is Clive Bundy the modern-day Hank Rearden?
Ruby Ridge and Waco????
Shoot first, ask questions later sort of mentality. Kind of like your average third-world dictatorship way of doing things.
So what if it wasn't the Federal government that owned the land, but rather Citizen B, let's say Rush Limbaugh owned the land. And Rush had allowed Bundy to graze cattle on it since 1870. Did Rush forfeit his land to Bundy because of his generosity? Can Rush now never repurpose his land, but must hold it forever in perpetuity, so Bundy can continue to graze on it.
I'm sympathetic to the plight of the Bundy's. They've built their home and business for decades on the use of land that didn't belong to them. And now they have no legal recourse to change their fate.
Heavy handed force was the first choice by the BLM for the simple reason the goal was intimidation and an object lesson for any other potential dissenters to federal rule.
Since the prevailing opinion seems to be that by blinking, the feds achieved just the opposite, expect pretty much a news blackout on the event(s) by the MSM.
My gut feeling is that the feds still want to make an example of Bundy. They are plotting a way to do more than just get their “grazing fees”.
Actually, there are cases where property turned over to someone else to use and care for can become the property of the user.
Even just mowing, mending/ installing fences, taking care of the property, making improvements, can serve to justify transfer of property to the individual doing the uncompensated caretaking / improvements.
It’s basically figured as abandonment and a touch of squater’s rights.
Two totally different things. Adverse possession is an actual taking, and has no chance in a court. Think of prescriptive like this: You own a tract of land, and have a home and the back end of it. You access that home by means of a gravel road from the main road, and have ever since you took ownership of the land. You decide you would like to subdivide. The local governing authority would most likely insist that you declare that gravel road an easement, whether your subdiv plan has it or does away with that road in some fashion. This is considered a prescriptive easement.
First things first. Congress needs to get together and fire the director.
Go from there.
You wrote: “How about “adverse possession” of the land as a Bundy defense?”
I worked for my late father-in-law in his small family land surveying company years ago. “Adverse Possession” was the first thing that came to mind when I read the headline.
No prescriptive rights or adverse possession against a State or Federal government.
Okay, but what exactly about the law failed? What needs to change?
Bundy claims it's that Federal Government took ownership of the land in the beginning and never gave it back to Nevada. Or rather, more accurately, he refuses to recognize that Federal government ever took possession of the land, even though his family previously paid grazing fees to the Federal government. That seems like a self-serving, revisionist stance to me.
Is it the EPA overreach on the turtle? Okay, in hindsight that does sound like overreach. I think we need better checks and balances on the EPA. But again, this was Federal owned land. Ownership conveys the right to do with the land what you want.
Maybe it's that the Federal government owns as much land as it does. That seems to be a sore point with a lot of people out west. There is a legislative remedy for that though. And if the government does sell off it's vast holdings, is there going to be enough water resources for the increased population? Something to think about.
Maybe it's that the BLM shows up with military hardware. Perhaps it should have been left to the local sheriff to enforce. But the BLM claims there were threats. Would it be any more acceptable if the Fed's had ordered the Sheriff to deputize enough people to overcome the threat?
Okay, but what exactly about the law failed? What needs to change?
Bundy claims it's that Federal Government took ownership of the land in the beginning and never gave it back to Nevada. Or rather, more accurately, he refuses to recognize that Federal government ever took possession of the land, even though his family previously paid grazing fees to the Federal government. That seems like a self-serving, revisionist stance to me.
Is it the EPA overreach on the turtle? Okay, in hindsight that does sound like overreach. I think we need better checks and balances on the EPA. But again, this was Federal owned land. Ownership conveys the right to do with the land what you want.
Maybe it's that the Federal government owns as much land as it does. That seems to be a sore point with a lot of people out west. There is a legislative remedy for that though. And if the government does sell off it's vast holdings, is there going to be enough water resources for the increased population? Something to think about.
Maybe it's that the BLM shows up with military hardware. Perhaps it should have been left to the local sheriff to enforce. But the BLM claims there were threats. Would it be any more acceptable if the Fed's had ordered the Sheriff to deputize enough people to overcome the threat?
That kind of depends on whether it was an informal friendly thing, or if it was a declared easement, especially one to encourage them to open a business or to settle adjacent to the property.
The Southwest has a number of odd divisions of owned property, but is not the only area. When I became a young adult, I was surprised that one could own a house, but not the land it resided on. Likewise, the minerals under the land might not be part of owning the property, nor water rights of streams flowing through it, nor grazing rights for wild vegetation on it, as well as right-of-way easements.
In most of the country between the original colonies and the Rockies, aside from the desert states, the land was lotteried, auctioned off, or simply opened for claim. In the west, there were large areas which were not suitable for habitation, and the federal government divided things up differently, with water rights and access rights being very major things - often more important than the land itself, and separate from the land ownership.
Does Bundy have those other rights? I don’t know...but to understand the situation, one has to understand that to say X owns property Y doesn’t necessarily meant that the ownership is all-inclusive.
In other environments, we have communities where some owners have lake rights, and others do not. We have the 10 feet beside the road that the town actually owns, as well as easements where the phone or power company has bought perpetual rights to put up poles, lines or bury cables, and nothing else and thus neither party can build on that land.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.