Another excellent comment regarding the Bundy tyranny by Nick Dranias: The underlying issues are much more complicated than this analysis suggests. The problem goes back to broken promises and frustrated legitimate expectations going back 150 years. The reality is that between 1855 and 1925 or so, the federal government encouraged migration to the West and the development of resources there with statutes that basically granted all kinds of very significant property rights through various forms of homesteading-like acts. One of those laws, the 1866 Mining Act, dealing with water rights and rights of way stated that it recognized and confirmed whatever local laws, customs and court decisions allowed. It turns out that for ranchers in the west, there were extensive systems of local customs connected to water rights and rights of way that created the expectation if not the right to graze the land. Now, in reality, such customs were a bit over the top--to interpret a federal grant/recognition of water rights and rights of way as entailing an incidental right of grazing hundreds or thousands of acres is strange. But Congress wrote the law as adopting local customs and boxed itself into that local custom. Since then, the federal government has either forgotten or frankly decided not to follow those original customary understandings and replaced a system of grazing rights that were bound up with local customs interpreting the scope of water rights with a system of permitting--even using fine print in permits to sneakily get ranchers (unrepresented by lawyers) to give up their rights in exchange for permits while being coerced with litigation if they did not. Fast forward to the Bundys who probably know this history.
Posted on: Sat, 12 Apr 2014 23:53:30 +0000
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