It’s time to hold Bundy accountable for standoff

The Obama administration is often criticized by conservatives for selectively enforcing, or failing to enforce, the law. These complaints most often arise in relation to immigration or drug laws that the president disagrees with, but this administration’s law enforcement failures go beyond those issues.

One of the most perplexing is its failure to hold Cliven Bundy accountable for the armed standoff he incited more than a year ago — along with his illegal cattle grazing, violation of court orders and refusal to pay more than $1 million in fines.

The administration’s actions, from abandoning its effort to remove Bundy’s cattle, to avoiding the area, to failing to arrest those who threatened federal law enforcement agents, has served only to embolden Bundy and encourage further lawlessness and intimidation.

It came as little surprise that researchers collecting data from federal public lands near where Bundy illegally grazes his cattle recently came under gunfire. This after they were approached earlier in the day by Bundy and his son. Although Bundy denies having anything to do with the incident, he acknowledged in the press, “We don’t like them here bothering us.”

Whether Bundy is responsible for the gunfire or not, his actions and comments make it pretty clear that he is asserting control over land he does not own. Is this the new normal in the West, where any anti-government bully can use intimidation to carve his own personal fiefdom out of land that actually belongs to all of us?

Interfering with researchers or government employees is bad enough, but what happens if a Bundy or one of his followers becomes bothered by tourists on a camping trip, a rancher with a valid grazing permit, or even an energy project?

The Bureau of Land Management which is supposed to manage the public land Bundy is riding herd over, seems to still be in full appeasement mode. So far, its response to the shots being fired near the researchers appears limited to telling its personnel and contractors not to work in the Gold Butte area.

And in Northern Nevada, when ranchers recently defied a drought-related closure order near Battle Mountain, the BLM quickly announced that it would not enforce the closure in order to avoid a confrontation.

The Obama administration’s timid and selective approach to law enforcement not only encourages more of the same from Bundy, but it emboldens others to disobey the law and to threaten law enforcement and other civil servants.

What conservatives tend to understand better than liberals is that when dealing with a bully — be it a terrorist, a tinhorn dictator, a drug dealer or a belligerent rancher who rejects U.S. authority — appeasement never works.

Our nation’s founders cautioned that the fate of our nation depends on maintaining the rule of law, and Republican presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan have emphasized that doing so requires diligent enforcement.

Theodore Roosevelt perhaps put it best when he said that the law “must be enforced with resolute firmness, because weakness in enforcing it means in the end that there is no justice and no law, nothing but the rule of disorderly and unscrupulous strength.”

Unless President Obama and his appointees at the BLM and the Department of Justice stop the liberal handwringing and heed Roosevelt’s sage advice, we will inevitably see more of our freedom, our safety and our natural heritage fall victim to lawlessness and bully rule.

A good start would be finally bringing to justice Cliven Bundy and those who took up arms against law enforcement more than a year ago.

John Adams wrote that we are “a nation of laws, not people.” By that, he meant that nobody is above the law — not the president, and certainly not Cliven Bundy.

David Jenkins is president of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship.