Title: The Federal Government's Response to the County Supremacy Movement
Abstract: cover story of the October 23, 1995 issue of Time was entitled, Don't Tread on Me: An Inside Look at the West's Growing Rebellion. At that time the country did indeed face the possibility of open rebellion on rangelands in the West. Sparked by the so-called County Supremacy Movement, counties throughout the region were passing ordinances purporting that the federal government did not have the right to own and manage the federal lands. Citing these ordinances ranchers, miners, and others were: refusing to obey the terms of permits, refusing to allow federal access to mining claims, refusing to pay grazing fees, squatting on federal lands, and refusing to obey lawful directives of federal land managers. On July 4, 1995, Nye County, Nevada Commissioner Dick Carver whose picture was on the cover of Time bulldozed open a closed U.S. Forest Service road in front of hundreds of people. The County Supremacy Movement in the rural West appears to be a resurgence of the Sagebrush Rebellion of the late 1970s. To oversimplify somewhat, this is something that seems to flare up in response to Democratic administrations in Washington that seek to assert federal control over commodity development activities on the federal lands, particularly grazing. The last Sagebrush Rebellion was sparked in part by Interior Secretary Cecil Andrus' attempts to reduce overgrazing on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands. In one response that has become suddenly relevant today as we shall see, the State of Nevada passed a law in 1979 purporting to take Over much of the federal land in that state.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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