Feds Exploit “Threatened” Bird for Massive Land Grab

The Obama administration is under fire from critics, state governments, and lawmakers for yet another federal “overreach” and abuse of power after it unveiled plans for a massive land grab across five states under the guise of protecting the “lesser prairie chicken.” Analysts and opponents of the scheme say the controversial decision to declare the bird “threatened” could unleash major damage against property rights, oil exploration, energy, farming, ranching, jobs, development, industry, states’ rights, the U.S. Constitution, and more. Affected state officials and lawmakers, though, are already considering their options to fight back. The Obama Fish and Wildlife Service ruling, announced late last week following a court ruling, adds to the escalating pattern of lawlessness in the federal government’s accelerating war on private property and state sovereignty. If growing efforts at the state and federal level to rein in the administration are unsuccessful, the decision, allegedly justified by the unconstitutional and much-abused “Endangered Species Act,” will go into effect on May 1. It affects about 40 million square acres — more than 62,500 square miles, or about 25 times the size of Delaware for perspective — across five states: Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas. Much of the land is privately owned. State officials, though, are attacking the scheme from all angles — particularly the administration’s latest abuse of the increasingly well-known “sue and settle” scam. Under the controversial tactic, employed primarily to defraud taxpayers and expand government power, federal agencies such as the EPA, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and countless other rogue outfits collude with radical special-interest groups. In a essence, the fraud works like this: A group sues the agency in question to demand some particular power grab that both the agency and the group want to foist on America unilaterally; then the agency agrees to “settle” by adopting the desired scheme while paying massive sums of taxpayer funds to the group that sued to set up future scams. The EPA has become particularly adept at defrauding taxpayers and skirting the Constitution using the plot, yet Congress continues to allow it despite occasional expressions of outrage. In response to the latest exploitation of the scam in the “threatened” lesser prairie chicken designation, where the Obama Interior Department “settled” with radical pseudo-environmentalists in a “sue and settle” case over the bird, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt filed his own lawsuit this month. In court filings, the top law-enforcement official for Oklahoma, one of the five affected states, explains that federal agencies are colluding with various special-interest outfits to bypass constitutional policymaking procedures — and the people...more