I was glad to see the news this morning that, for now, the situation in Nevada involving a rancher and the federal Bureau of Land Management has been defused.  Faced with a growing group of protesters on-site and a growing backlash from politicians at the state and federal level, BLM has stopped trying to round up the cattle that Mr. Bundy has been grazing on federal land.

As I understand it, Mr. Bundy has failed to pay the normal fees that ranchers pay to utilize such lands, claiming that he does not recognize federal authority over lands he thinks should rightly belong to his state, Nevada.  He also claims a long-standing familial connection to the land, since his pioneer ancestors used them.  The federal government disagrees, and has been in court with Mr. Bundy for years.  It would appear that the round-up of Mr. Bundy’s cattle on federal land was the latest in a series of skirmishes in and out of court between Bundy and the federal government.

On this string of the tangled knot, I have to side with the federal government.  We, through our representatives, have given the federal government the power and the job to regulate public lands in all 50 states.  Whether this is a constitutionally sound role for the federal government hasn’t, as far as I know, been decided one way or another by the courts.  Since the courts continue to rule in favor of the government in cases like Bundy’s, I feel safe in saying that it is constitutional.

Bundy seems to have recognized this when he was paying the fees to use federal lands for grazing prior to 1993.  Why he stopped, I don’t know.  As for his reasoning that because his family has been grazing on that land for a long time, he ought to be able to do it at will, I can’t agree with this.  What his grandfather was able to do has nothing to do with what he is able to do, so long as the law that changes that ability is constitutional.

Now, just to bring things back around, I’m going to fault the government in the way they went about this whole thing.  Yes, I believe that it was a proper use of government power to confiscate cattle that are illegally grazing on public lands.  But to do so with armed federal agents, possibly including snipers, is out of bounds.  The term I’m looking for here is “improper escalation”.   (Why BLM has armed agents in the first place is a subject for later discussion.  Remember – Texas Rangers, FBI, Secret Service, and that’s the entire list of people in the federal government that don’t salute when they pass one another and should be issued weapons.)

Once Mr. Bundy and his family began to physically oppose the roundup, BLM should have called the local sheriff and the governor of Nevada requesting local law enforcement assistance.  I’m not saying that the locals would have handled things any better than the feds did, but a few deputies going out to the Bundy place and talking to him might have gone over better than having his son tazed by a nameless federal agent.

Reports are that BLM decided that discretion was the better part of valor after protesters in Nevada began openly defying the roundup.  Some of the protesters appear to have been armed with rifles.  I’ll give the feds points here for looking at what was shaping up and deciding that some cows and turtles aren’t worth spilling quarts of blood and gallons of ink on their already tarnished reputation.

So, we can chalk this one up to a ‘win’ for those of us who want the government to learn its proper place, assuming that this is really over.  I, for one, don’t believe that it is.  The government claims that Mr. Bundy owes over $1.1 million in fees, and I’ll bet that the cost of this latest round of confrontation will get tacked onto that.  I wouldn’t be surprised if BLM lawyers aren’t already at work for the next round of court battles.

Another thing I see coming is someone, probably a resident or employee of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, making a stink about the fact that the protesters were at least as well armed as the federal agents they faced.  Coupled with the shootings at Fort Hood and Kansas City, I expect that this incident will be used to try to rekindle the gun control debate.  This would give the Democrats something to whip up their base in what promises to be a harsh election cycle.  All it would take for that to really catch fire is for something as horrific as Aurora or Sandy Hook to happen, and we’re right back where we were last winter.

Let’s be happy that the situation in Nevada didn’t get out of hand, and that the federal government deescalated.  Let’s hope that this is the beginning of a pattern of change in the behavior of the government.  But let’s never forget that our response is always being watched, and will be used against us, either in court or in the press.