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“Congress Makes The Laws In America,
Not The BLM”
Not The BLM”
By Richard Viguerie, WND, THIS LAND WAS YOUR LAND — The U.S. Bureau of Land Management has, at least temporarily, deescalated its armed standoff with Cliven Bundy and his family at their Nevada ranch – though Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has ominously pledged: “It’s not over. We can’t have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it. So it’s not over.”
So you can be sure the feds will be back.
In fact, a Bundy Ranch standoff repeat is now brewing on the Oklahoma-Texas border. The Bureau of Land Management (the rogue federal agency that precipitated the Bundy Ranch standoff in Nevada) is considering seizing 90,000 acres of private land along the Red River that forms part of the border between Texas and Oklahoma.
The BLM is now contemplating the same strategy it used some 30 years ago to deprive Texas rancher Tommy Henderson of 140 acres of his property without paying him 1 cent to gain control of more land in the Red River area.
You would think Harry Reid, who represents Nevada in the U.S. Senate, would come to the defense of his Nevada constituents. But he doesn’t – because Harry Reid represents the Ruling Establishment in Washington. He wants nothing to do with the regular folks in Nevada, unless he’s running for re-election.
Harry Reid says, “We can’t have an American people that violate the law and then just walk away from it.”
But President Obama has violated (unilaterally changed) his own Obamacare law at least 37 times.
So it’s OK for President Obama and the Washington Ruling Class to violate the law, just not average folks.
It’s easy to dismiss Cliven Bundy, because Harry Reid and his crony Neil Kornz, who runs the BLM, would like you to believe that Mr. Bundy is just a guy who won’t pay his bills.
They won’t tell you that there used to be dozens of ranches in the area where the Bundys run their cattle. Now there’s just one – the Bundy Ranch. BLM succeeded in pushing all the other ranchers out of the region.
The BLM claims the Bundys owe the feds more than $1 million in fees and penalties.
Bundy notes that these fees were never authorized by Congress or passed into law. The BLM just started charging them on its own, without congressional statute. According to the U.S. Constitution, Congress makes the laws in America, not the BLM.
Cliven Bundy asks: Why should I be paying the federal government to put me out of business?
The Bundys are the first example in recent decades of average Americans pushing back federal bureaucrats and winning – at least temporarily.
But there’s a lot more at work in the Bundy Ranch standoff than Harry Reid siding with the federal bureaucracy against his own constituents.
Reid’s son, Rory Reid, parlayed his tenure as a Clark County commissioner into a sweetheart deal with a giant Chinese energy company that wanted to build $5 billion solar farm and panel-building plant in the southern Nevada desert – right where Cliven Bundy and his family have been grazing their cattle since the 1870s.
But where are the Republican leaders on this?
We haven’t heard a peep from John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, or any of the Republican leadership. Their silence is deafening.
There’s a populist revolt going on out there against the Ruling Establishment in Washington. But the Republican leadership is nowhere to be seen or heard.
Real leaders would be making the trip to the Bundy Ranch to find out what’s really happening, what the issues are.
At a minimum, John Boehner and other prominent Republicans should be calling hearings on the unconstitutional fees the BLM has imposed on the Bundys and other ranchers in the West.
Standing with the ranchers against the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., would make great optics for the Republicans.
But today’s Republican leadership has no imagination, which is why most people don’t like them.
It’s why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is in trouble in Kentucky – among the reddest of red conservative states. Even his Republican constituents don’t like him because he’s so obviously part of the Ruling Establishment in Washington.
This is why the GOP so desperately needs new leadership. Standing with the Bundy family against an overreaching federal government would have been the right thing to do.
It would have signaled to voters across America that the GOP is on the side of the people and against out-of-control Big Government.
And it would be political gold for the GOP going into the 2014 mid-term elections. » Full Article
About the Author
Richard A. Viguerie is the author of the new book “Takeover: The 100-Year War for the Soul of the GOP and How Conservatives Can Finally Win It.”
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