Steve Baldwin
January 11, 2018
The Utah and Bundy Ranch cases are a reminder of just how constitutionally untenable and corrupting federal ownership is.
With President Trump’s recent order to “shrink” two massive federal land grabs in Utah and a shocking turn of events in the Bundy Ranch/BLM controversy, the issue of federal land ownership is back in the news. Both events illustrate how the federal government has used its massive land holdings to control the lives of Americans.
And lurking in the background of these events is the constitutionality of federal land ownership, an issue that has been ignored for generations by politicians, the courts, and the media. Indeed, the evidence is fairly clear that our founding fathers did not design the federal government to be America’s largest landowner with all the abuses that entails.
The federal government now has a total of 640 million acres under its control — almost a third of the nation’s land.
The majority of land in Nevada, Alaska, Utah, Oregon and Idaho is owned by the feds. In Arizona, California, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Colorado, federal ownership exceeds a third. Indeed, if all 11 Western states were combined into one territory, the feds would own nearly 50% of it.
This land is primarily administered by the United States Forest Service (USFS), the National Park Service (NPS), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The Department of Defense also owns 20 million acres...........Moreover, the Constitution even details what to do with federally owned property inside newly acquired states. It declares that the federal government has a duty to dispose of this land unless it is being used for an enumerated purpose, meaning that all federal land not being used for activities specifically authorized by the Constitution should be transferred back to the states. An in-depth analysis of these clauses by the 10th Amendment Center can be found here............To Read More...
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