It's Time For Conservatives to Jump Off the Bundy Bandwagon

There has been a reluctance here to cover the story of Mr. Bundy's Standoff with the Bureau of Land Management. To be honest, I didn't really understand how it became such a huge cause amongst many of my conservative friends.

 On one hand I agree with the rancher when he talks about "state's rights" and the overreach of the federal government, but on the other side he has said publicly that he believes the federal govt. has no power, is defying a court order, and breaking a law that most every other rancher is following.  

But now Mr. Bundy has shown himself to be a racist and its time for all of his conservative supporters to jump off his bandwagon.

This is from this morning's New York Times:

He said he would continue holding a daily news conference; on Saturday, it drew one reporter and one photographer, so Mr. Bundy used the time to officiate at what was in effect a town meeting with supporters, discussing, in a long, loping discourse, the prevalence of abortion, the abuses of welfare and his views on race.

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

I believe Mr. Bundy's cows should be able to graze on the despite the  tortoises, I also believe the federal government owns too much land in the western part of the country (including 85% of Nevada).

Here's the real issue though. One of the main objections many of us have to amnesty for illegal immigrants is that they broke the law to come into the country.  If we object to the trespassing immigrants breaking the law, shouldn't we be objecting to American citizens breaking the law?

As Ben Shapiro wrote at  TruthRevolt yesterday:

Bundy's position on the federal government itself is unjustifiable. He stated in a recent interview: "I believe this is a sovereign state of Nevada. I abide by all of Nevada state laws. But I don't recognize the United States government as even existing." Obviously, the federal government does exist, and if the state of Nevada exists, it only does so because it was formed with the permission of the feds under the Constitution.

In fact, the Constitution of Nevada explicitly denies Bundy's interpretation of the law: "no power exists in the people of this or any other State of the Federal Union to dissolve their connection therewith or perform any act tending to impair, subvert, or resist the Supreme Authority of the government of the United States."

Like the Illegal Immigrant, Cliven Bundy has broken the law to get what he wants.  He should fight within the system to change the law.  If he was going for an act of civil disobedience to make a statement, he should be prepared to accept the consequences. One of the consequences is confiscation of property including Elsie and all the other cows. But Mr. Bundy is trying to have it both ways break the law but face no consequences.  Beyond that I am not aware of any attempt of his to try and change the law, just his refusal to follow it.

In the end Cliven Bundy's actions are indefensible from a conservative point of view while the federal government should not be owning the land---they do. In the end the govt. was protecting its property rights however unjustified they are.

Now that Mr. Bundy is shown to have at best racially insensitive beliefs, it time to end his 15 minutes of fame and its time for my conservative friends and colleagues who have shown him support to run away as fast as humanly possible.

Update: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air points out:

This has always been a tricky case, one where sympathies and the law go in opposite directions, as John Hinderaker noted at Power Line last week. Legally, Bundy doesn’t have a leg on which to stand, and his weird insistence that the federal government has no jurisdiction on federal land has no basis in law or reality. Having the BLM show up with a small army to collect a debt made it easy to sympathize with Bundy and to call their actions into question, but they’ve been pursuing this case through the courts for more than two decades, too, while Bundy grazes on federal land. The federal government may own too much land, but that’s an issue for the states to fight in court, not ranchers with guns.