Freedom Outpost – by Tim Brown
The Bundy Ranch trials are going to begin soon. With that in mind, the political prisoners in the case are seeking to make the Constitution and the Bureau of Land Management the focal point of the case to expose the lawlessness of the agency, as well as the unconstitutional actions of the central government to grab land that the Constitution says it cannot obtain except through the state legislature. Now, congressmen are attempting to shut your mouth from declaring what can be done on unconstitutionally usurped lands by the BLM.
AmmoLand Editor Duncan Johnson writes:
Sportsmen, landowners, and former Bureau of Land Management employees strongly criticized a move by senators and representatives to overturn the BLM’s revised land-use planning rule, known as Planning 2.0.
Using the obscure and rarely used Congressional Review Act, federal decision makers took a first step toward repealing the new rule and rolling back opportunities for the public to have more say in land management decisions.
In a statement, Senate co-sponsors of a Congressional Review Act resolution cite bad information about the final rule, namely that it fails to prioritize feedback from all stakeholders, including local governments. However, if lawmakers are successful, the BLM would be forced to continue using outdated guidelines for land-use planning established in 1983, which keep the public in the dark until very late in the planning process.
The Congressional Review Act is a little-known law that enables Congress to roll back regulations within 60 legislative days of their enactment. The BLM planning rule, while under development since 2014, was finalized in December 2016, so it falls within the window of eligibility for repeal by the CRA. The process has only been successful once.
“It has been publicly recognized by county commissioners and conservation districts that the BLM took meaningful steps between the draft and final planning rules to accommodate requests from local governments and the public to improve the process,” says Whit Fosburgh, president and CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership. “Now, Congress is working to reduce agency transparency and limit the public’s ability to have a say in how their public lands are managed. While a few concerns might remain, Congress is going about this the wrong way.”
“The Western Landowners Alliance supports the BLM’s efforts in updating planning to meet today’s needs in the West,” says Lesli Allison, executive director of the Western Landowners Alliance. “There are opportunities for improvement, but not to the detriment of eliminating all the good progress that has been made to date. We believe working through the Secretary of Interior is the best way to achieve our goals and constructively address any remaining concerns with the rule.”
Roosevelt was a usurper of the Constitution in his own right in illegally grabbing land from the states.
Johnson points out that if a rule is overturned via CRA, then no new rule that is “substantially the same” can ever be developed.
“A Congressional Review Act repeal would eliminate Planning 2.0 and likely eliminate the BLM’s authority to revise their planning regulations ever again in the future,” says Jesse Juen, president of the Public Lands Foundation and a longtime BLM employee. “Instead of stripping the incoming Secretary of the Interior of his authority before he takes office, lawmakers should work with the new administration to make refinements to a planning process that many stakeholders championed.”
The second problem is the unconstitutional agency known as the Bureau of Land Management. These people think their authority supersedes that of the Constitution. Nowhere in our Constitution does it give the authority to enforce the laws of the Constitution to the BLM. Rather, all laws of our Constitution are to be enforced by the citizen militia.