GOP Candidates, White House Urge Peaceful End to Oregon Standoff

Republican presidential candidates and the White House called Monday for a peaceful resolution to the armed standoff at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, a location where a group of militia members along with some family members of the Nevada rancher, Cliven Bundy, are occupying a building on federal land. During a press conference in Boone, Iowa, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) urged the militia members to "stand down peacefully." "Everyone has a Constitutional right to protest, to speak our minds, but we don’t have a constitutional right to use force and violence and threaten force and violence on others," Cruz said. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) sounded a similar note in an interview with KBUR in Oregon. “You can’t be lawless," Rubio said in comments first reported by BuzzFeed. "We live in a republic. There are ways to change the laws of this country and the policies. If we get frustrated with it, that’s why we have elections. That’s why we have people we can hold accountable.” Rubio said he did think "there is too much federal control over land, especially out in the western part of the United States." "We should fix it," he said. "But no one should be doing it in a way that’s outside the law." Speaking to reporters after a town hall meeting in Staten Island, New York, GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson weighed in. "I think it's ridiculous that the government owns so much land and that we should enact a program whereby we gradually begin to restore that land to the states," Carson said, while acknowledging, "we can't do it all in one fell swoop because they wouldn't be able to afford it." Carson also said, "I think right now the government's handling it in the right way by not being confrontational."...ABC