Lawfare Against Those Who Feed Us

... and the absurdity of "federal lands"

Chris Bray writes Tell Me How This Ends, a stack I enjoy and you might, as well. Give it a read!

In the referenced piece, he discusses federal land issues, and notes the following:

… the USDA oversees about 200 million acres of public land in the United States, while the Department of the Interior “oversees roughly 420 million acres of federal lands, nearly 55 million acres of tribal lands, more than 700 million acres of subsurface minerals, and about 2.5 billion acres of the outer continental shelf.”

Chris’ piece is about ending the lawfare against people and families in the ag business, for which I have a particular fondness, having worked on a small family ranch (herding cows and horses and turning cattle and hogs into dinner and breakfast), and herded horses, cows, and dudes in the Wind River Range on a Wyoming dude ranch.

But let’s just look briefly at the idea of “federal” lands…

The problem I have with the idea of “federal lands” is this: there are none.

After all, per the Enclave Clause (Article 1, Section 8), the states delegated to the federal government they were creating to serve them the authority “to exercise like authority over all places purchased by the consent of the legislature of the state…,” and the Property Clause (Article 4, Section 3) delegates the “power to dispose of” land. No authority exists to take or keep land other than for enumerated purposes – forts, magazines, dockyards, post roads, etc.

If the feds want to buy land from a state or states, they must make their case to the legislature of that state. For,

The federal government has no authority to grab land – the expectation of the Founders was that the federal government would own no land and would give (or sell) back to the States land not incorporated into a State for the purpose of new States or larger States.

The federal government's authority to dispose was unlimited (except for trust standards), but its authority to acquire, retain, and manage was not: all the latter functions could be exercised only to serve enumerated powers.

We don't act like it much these days, but the fifty United States remain theoretically sovereign entities. No state transferred sovereignty, an act requiring written surrender of same, to the federal government. Confiscation of their land by the federal government is an affront to their sovereignty. The Supreme Court has specifically held on eminent domain -- government takings of land for the general welfare:

Under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the Court held that states could not contract away their sovereign powers, including their powers of eminent domain.

So the feds can’t use eminent domain to gobble up state lands to create “federal land,” whether to lock-out coal reserves for Clinton’s overseas coal grift, or to address various hoaxes like the climate scam, which is the unconvincing and irrelevant excuse for Brandon’s 30 by 30 plan.

Unfortunately, and in a far broader context than land, our governors, for inexplicable reason are more than willing to allow the constant encroachment against their reserved powers by a federal government lacking any authority for their usurpation of state authority. Likely, this is because governors fantasize they are in AAA ball awaiting a call-up to The Show. Regardless of their excuse, it is up to governors to keep the feds within the lines the - superior - states drew around the - inferior - feds in the Constitution.

That more governors aren’t reacting to a proposed unconstitutional federal land grab is, frankly, embarrassing. It’s almost as though governors don’t or refuse to grasp that the states are the senior partners in our government.

Governors need to step-up to this unknown person or cabal running the Executive Branch and trying to steal from us one third of our own country. And say “Nope.” Loud, early and often.

And again,

There are good scholarly arguments which contend that the concept of any land belonging to the federal government, above and beyond what is required to execute its enumerated powers – the only powers it has – is fallacious. Former Montana state senator Casey Emerson offered this view:

Title to the land in Montana should have gone to the state as soon as Montana became a state in 1889. And the only real question is: Does the federal government owe us rent on that land since then?

The feds, with questionable constitutional authority, lay claim to over one-quarter of our land and want to increase that to one-third. They want to confiscate our land in order to save us from… “climate change.” And enrich their friends and cronies in the bargain.

President Autopen, whoever he, she, or they was or were, issued an Executive Order over FJB’s faked signature to confiscate yet more land until they “owned” thirty percent of our land and thirty percent of our water, which I discussed here.

We can discuss proper stewardship of American land and waterways, of course, but that discussion cannot and must not include the federal – not national – government. It has no role unless it wants to purchase the land and waterways from the state or states.

As with many of my posts, I lean on the enumerated powers. These are the only powers the federal government has, and they are why we refer to America as a republic of “limited constitutional powers.”

If Trump is going to drain the swamp, enforcing the enumerated powers is the – only – way to do it. Simply ask Musk to create an AI query to review the federal law and regulatory databases and identify all laws and regulations not supported by the enumerated powers. And then EO them out of existence.

…because anything else is just playing around the edges as we devolve into bankrupt tyranny…

One would hope that the federal courts would not demand rejection of the constitution they are sworn to protect to stop him from doing so as he terminates everything exercising power the federal government does not have.

But if they were to decide to do so, they would be actively usurping state authority and must, constitutionally, be ignored.