Arizona
Official: Cliven Bundy’s Acts Are Legal
The Nevada cattle rancher at the center of a land dispute with the
federal government should not have to surrender his property, an Arizona
official says, because he has been acting within the boundaries of the law.
Barry Weller, vice chairman of the Apache County Board of
Supervisors, told J.D. Hayworth and John Bachman on “America’s Forum” Monday on
Newsmax TV that he thinks Cliven Bundy was right in standing up to the Bureau
of Land Management, which sought to seize his ranch.
Bundy says his family has homesteaded since 1877 on the land,
which the federal government says belongs to the United States. As part of a
conservation effort to protect the endangered desert tortoise, the Bureau of
Land Management banned cattle grazing on the land in 1989. Bundy continued to
graze his cattle and refused to pay fines levied against him, calling the
federal policy a land grab.
The case is similar to another in Nevada, in which Wayne Hage won
a protracted battle with the federal government by successfully arguing that he
had the right to graze his cows within two miles of water sources he developed.
“The Bundys and the Hages are standing on what’s called their
water rights and their grazing rights,” which, Weller said, “were pre-existing
in territorial times, long before the government took over and these states
became states and these water rights are mentioned, and any federal law or
policy act that comes thereafter is always stated, ‘subject to pre-existing
rights.’
“So, when people say they’re not legally doing what they’re doing,
they are. They are doing what they’re supposed to be doing: standing for their
rights,” Weller said.
Story continues below video.
Weller said Sen. Harry Reid’s comments on the situation have
served no purpose other than “to ratchet up the force of the federal government
against the citizens.”
He added the government’s actions against Bundy amount to a
criminal shakedown for payment.
“That was absolutely deadly force,” Weller said. “I don’t know
that it’s hitting the news out there, but [the BLM] were killing cattle, they
shot his prize bull from a helicopter through the back of the neck and killed
him. Several cattle were killed as they rounded them up and pulled them into
the BLM pens. It’s just a devastation of force.”
The only solution to this problem, Weller said, is for the
government to follow through on the transfer of public land that was promised
to all newly created states at statehood but honored only to the states east of
Colorado.
“The people who take the best care of anything are the people who
own it and have it close to them,” Weller said. “The federal government has no
idea what they’re doing with these lands from a remote place in Washington,
D.C., and they are deteriorating the resources of this country.
“There are trillions and trillions of dollars of natural resources
here which do not have to be mined or received in a way that is brutal to the
country or to the landscape, but are in a way that will profit and take care of
the debt of this country if we open them up to the public and to the states so
they can be utilized.”
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