Rhetorical question of the day: Why is it that the Obama Bureau of Land Management is so much more capable and enthusiastic about helping smuggle jihadists into the country than they are about respecting the property rights of American citizens?:
A land dispute is creating tension between miners in Josephine County [Oregon] and the Bureau of Land Management. The owners of the mines say they are afraid their rights to due process will not be respected and have now called in reinforcements.
The Oath Keepers of Josephine County are gathering at a piece of property near Merlin. They're in the process of setting up a staging area, in order to step in if they are needed by the Sugar Pine miners.
“Because we are constitutional group,” said Mary Emerick with Oath Keepers. “We defend the Constitution… And we are here just to make sure that they receive their Fifth Amendment rights which is due process.”
The owners called them in to help protect the property that they have mined for more than 100 years. The miners say documents they have grandfathered-in their surface rights to the property.
But the BLM says the documents are outdated, and at some point, the property has changed hands which cancels out the grandfather process. Now, the BLM says the miners have to tone down their mining operation to stay in line with the regulations.
How unilaterally convenient.
I find it interesting that the BLM is going so far out of its way to assure everybody that there will be due process, etc., etc., etc. in direct correlation with the preemptive deployment of the Oath Keepers. It's almost as if they have no appetite for reprising the PR disaster of what happened at Casa Bundy a year ago.
Nevertheless, they are still way, way outside federal law as it is:
There have been many questions about rumors of a battle brewing between the Bureau of Land Management and several miners within the Galice Mining District. While we cannot yet divulge any fine details (and ultimately must keep legal tactics completely private), at this time, we can confirm the following:
1. BLM recently (3/18/15) issued two Stop Orders on a mine, citing authority under their 3809 regulations, despite the fact that this is one of the oldest active claims in the country. The location date of this mine is so old that one of the location notices (the legal title to the mine) was actually first recorded in the original Galice Mining District Recorder’s book in 1876 and then later transcribed into the Josephine County Clerk’s records once the county assumed recording duties. Under the 1955 Surface Resources Act, claims of this age have exclusive surface rights unless the Department of Interior utilized a mechanism outlined in that Act to sever those surface rights. Demands to BLM to produce evidence of their surface authority in accordance to the 1955 Act have thus far garnered only “because we say so” answers and numerous stonewalling tactics. The Stop Orders came after several months of back and forth maneuvering from both sides, and are clearly retaliatory in nature.
2. BLM are in active violation, on multiple counts, of federal Freedom of Information Act statutes… Similar documents secured by another miner have appeared to have been “heavily parsed” of key file documents, raising suspicion that BLM is either actively suppressing the release of documents that could be very damning or has been actively destroying documents which they are obligated under Federal Law to maintain and provide on request. One of the BLM employees suspected of parsing the records in question has apparently left BLM in the last few days.
3. What few documents have been produced by BLM to date (many of which are in no way very legible) have displayed a long history of non-compliance with federal and state laws, as well as their own regulations, as well as instances of suspected forgery, fraud, extortion of real estate and other issues that suggest a well organized conspiracy that divested thousands of miners and others of their property rights, which in turn has allowed the BLM and the USFS to exercise ruthless control over the entire Public Domain of the Far West, including rights of ingress and egress.
4. A BLM mineral tech involved in this case remarked (4/8/15) to the attorney who is handling this case that he is aware that the BLM position is not “open and shut” and is proceeding on shaky ground. Ultimately, BLM’s attack on the mine is a rolling of dice in the hope that they can get their way opposed to anything grounded in reality.
Typical Obama Regime despotism. It's just that this instance is deep in the shadows. What Galice Mining is doing is simply shining the light of public scrutiny upon it and watching the cockroaches scatter. Another illustration, perhaps, of how the Old American Republic may not be so hopelessly lost as many of us have thought.
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