Bundy sues to have feds booted from Nevada land

Bob Unruh

...This time, rancher Cliven Bundy is seeking a judicial ruling that the federal land in Nevada on which he was grazing cattle belongs to the state of Nevada and the people of Clark County, not the U.S. government. Former federal prosecutor Larry Klayman, who has been working through the Cliven Bundy Defense Fund, filed the complaint in the state’s Eighth Judicial District Court. Now Klayman has filed a suit against the state, county, individuals and corporations arguing that while the federal government briefly held rights to the land when the territories became states, “the land was disposed of by U.S. Congress to the people of Territory of Nevada.” He cites an 1845 Supreme Court ruling establishing that such lands were under the control of the feds “for the purposes of temporary government” and “to hold it in trust for the performance of the stipulations and conditions expressed in the deeds of cession and the legislative acts connected with them.” Klayman told WND, “A state court judge is going to be hard pressed to rule that the land does not belong to the people of Nevada and Clark County.” The complaint points out that “the legislature of Nevada has never consented to allow the U.S. government to own at least 85 percent of the land within Nevada’s borders; and the intent of the territorial legislature was not to cede the land to the U.S. government ‘forever,’ but to clear title of all unappropriated lands with the territory so U.S. Congress could dispose of the lands to the state.” Further, the complaint explains, Nevada “expressly repudiated federal ownership of the subject land when it enacted a series of statutes declaring ownership of and control and jurisdiction over all ‘public lands’ within Nevada.” It was James Madison who insisted “new states shall be admitted on the same terms with the original states.” The complaint explains that in 1866, Congress adopted an act setting the boundaries of Nevada that “erased any possible prior claim of the United States of America to the public lands within Nevada’s borders.”...more