The Bundy standoff reminds us that government is our servant, not our master.
A great deal of the discussion about the ClivenBundy standoff in Nevada has focused on the legal questions — the litigation between Mr. Bundy and theBLM, his eccentric (i.e., batzoid) legal rationales, etc. But as Rich Lowry and others have argued, this is best understood not as a legal proceeding but as an act of civil disobedience. John Hinderaker and Rich both are correct that as a legal question Mr. Bundy is legless. But that is largely beside the point.
Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too, when he was tried for sedition; Mr. Gandhi himself habitually was among the first to acknowledge that fact, refusing to offer a defense in his sedition case and arguing that the judge had no choice but to resign, in protest of the perfectly legal injustice unfolding in his courtroom, or to sentence him to the harshest sentence possible, there being no extenuating circumstances for Mr. Gandhi’s intentional violation of the law. Henry David Thoreau was happy to spend his time in jail, knowing that the law was against him, whatever side justice was on.
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3 comments:
Very well written. This is a case for the courts, and not an excuse to steal a community's food supply, which 900 head of cattle provides to a very large community. It's that community that showed up to protect that which has been grazing there in harmony with the Gopher Tortoise for 200 years. Before the State gave it to the Federales and before the BLM was even invented, and before any law was ever written to prohibit its use by cattle.
Can anyone tell me which Amendment contains the clause, "Ex Post Facto"?
The Ex Post Facto thing is not in any amendment, it's in the main body. I think it's in Article I, Section 9 or Section 10 or somewhere thereabouts. But you raise a very good point!
These 2 paragraphs from the Bundy Ranch blog say it all-
For years, the Obama Administration, through its Department of Homeland Security, has been arming and armoring federal, state and local agencies, allegedly for national security. At the same time, it has made multiple unsuccessful efforts to remove guns en masse from citizens' hands.
At the Bundy Ranch Showdown, the federal government learned a couple of things: first, that Americans aren't giving up their guns because they know that they are the last line against a tyrannical government; second, that your average American law enforcement agent will not fire upon a group of fellow Americans without a far better reason than a bunch of cows and some baloney about an endangered tortoise; third, that many folks still understand that government gets its authority from the people, not vice versa.
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