On a closer examination, the case against Cliven Bundy is not the open-and-shut case the federal government, the media, and the environmental activist groups, such as the Center for Biological Diversity, make it out to be. As California State University criminology professor Jason Kissner pointed out in a column for American Thinker yesterday, it is the Obama administration’s BLM and Attorney General Eric Holder that are engaged in “brazen lawlessness.” Federal officials are exploiting the fact that few Americans understand the legal complexities of the “split estate,” “prior appropriation doctrine,” and other principles governing water rights, grazing rights, and other land use/property rights on “public” and private lands, that are different in the arid West than in other parts of the country.
The current battle between the Bundys and the Feds is a replay of the decades-long confrontation between various federal agencies and the late Wayne Hage, the Nevada rancher/liberty activist/scholar who won multiple court victories and landmark decisions against federal overreach. In an interview with The New American in 2002, Hage explained the important legal distinctions that govern property rights in the West, particularly as they apply to so-called public lands.
FK – The ‘world’ needs to watch the treason trials and executions via the net. That will be the only real solution.