The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend.
Harry Reid is one of the most arrogant, ignorant
political hacks to have been foisted on the American people in a generation.
Barrels of ink have been spilled chronicling his ignorance, corruption and
almost comical incompetence. He would be legitimately comical if not for the
fact that he is the Senate Majority leader and wields real power. Harry Reid’s
latest enemy is Cliven Bundy, a Nevada cattleman who refuses to pay the Federal
Government its “grazing fee” and as a consequence recently was surrounded by
over 200 swat-team toughs from the Bureau of Land Management. This story is a
complicated tail that goes back years and years, but once the helicopters and
jack-booted Feds showed up it became headline news and quickly became a cause célèbre
among the Tea Party, anti-government set. For them, Cliven Bundy was the hard
working rancher fighting an out of control leviathan sent to rob him of his
land and livelihood. Bundy good, Harry Reid bad.
My sympathies are always going to be with the
individual against the State, and in this case especially so. The image of a
bunch of Delta Team Six wannabees descending on a lone cattle rancher strikes
me as a despicable overreach. But, once you explore this story in greater
detail, it’s hard to maintain those sympathies.
Cliven Bundy has been a rancher all of his life like
his family before him who have owned that land since 1870. He lives in a State
where the Federal Government owns 84% of the land. He is also surrounded by
hundreds of other cattle ranchers who, although they might not LIKE it, have
had no problem paying the grazing fee. Bundy has refused to pay since 1993 and
now finds himself $300,000 in arrears. Apparently the big shots at the BLM
decided that they had had enough of Bundy and decided to make an example of
him. So some idiot came up with the idea of confiscating his 400 head of cattle
and holding them as ransom until he paid…or something like that. A hot mess has
developed.
Listen, I take a back seat to no one in my
frustration with big government. We suffer under a tyranny of laws, 80,000 pages of
them at last count in the Federal Register. Furthermore, it pains me to write
checks to the IRS when I consider how much of the money will be spent. But we
live in a Constitutional Republic, the success of which is predicated on a
population committed to the rule of law. Now, obviously if the Feds pass a law
that asks me to kill my children, I will rebel even to the point of violent
revolution to overthrow such a government. But short of that, I don’t get to
pick and choose which laws I want to obey. I don’t get to attach a note to that
check I just wrote to the IRS that says, “Oh, by the way, I deducted 20% from
what I owe you because I don’t want to fund Obamacare.”
If Mr. Bundy doesn’t like the grazing fee, he should
organize his fellow ranchers; raise hell at the State capital. He should become
a royal pain in the neck on the local political scene and agitate for someone
to run against Harry Reid. Cliven Bundy might be a decent hardworking guy who
has been unduly harassed by an out of control government, but he also may be a
cantankerous old fart who hates taxes. In either case, he’s no hero.
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