Why does federal government own 84% of Nevada and what can Reid do to give it back?
April 16, 2014 by Jonathon Moseley 117 Comments
Many say Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could easily arrange for his home state to get back most of the 84 percent of Nevada territory owned and controlled by the federal government. So does the Democrat represent the interests of Nevada, or does he put the interests of the U.S. government and the Democratic Party over his own state’s needs?
Nevada would get what it deserves if Reid drafted a measure to treat Nevada the same way as other states. The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives would eagerly vote to treat Nevada like a grown-up. Instead, Reid runs the U.S. Senate with an iron fist, to the detriment of his own voters.
Renegade rancher Cliven Bundy raised a question during the hair-raising show-down between the Bureau of Land Management and the militia supporting the cattle rancher. Bundy says he was paying grazing fees to Clark County, but that the county stopped accepting his payments. Bundy insists that Nevada, not the U.S. government, owns the land where his cattle graze.
According to the ranchers’ argument, the federal government “owned” or controlled every territory before it became a state, but once statehood was reached, the land became the property of the new state.
So how is it that the U.S. government owns 84 percent of Nevada? It certainly looks like Nevada citizens are being treated unfairly. It is almost as if Washington, D.C., is treating Nevada like a child that can’t manage itself.
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Many Western states were treated unequally when they joined the Union. Unlike Eastern states, Congress reserved vast amounts of federally-owned land in the “Enabling Acts” for statehood in the West. Article 4, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution requires an act of Congress to create a state. Keeping the majority of land in federal control seems in conflict with the very concept of statehood. The second paragraph of Section 4 appears to authorize this bizarre practice. But on closer inspection, that is far from clear.
The Nevada Constitution includes an “Ordinance” section that adopts the requirements of the congressional Enabling Act. A second rewrite of the state constitution was approved by voters on Sept. 7, 1864. Nevada became the 36th state on Oct. 31, 1864. Nevada agreed to let the federal government own “unappropriated land” within the state, “unless otherwise provided by the Congress of the United States.”
Las Vegas Review Journal reported in December:Some Nevadans, particularly from the rural areas of the state, have been pushing the idea of a state takeover of federal lands for years.All these years later, Congress could easily right this discriminatory wrong. As the leader of the U.S. Senate, Reid could propose a change reverting the property to Nevada’s control, and Republicans in the House would enthusiastically agree.
Supporters were successful in the 2013 session of the Nevada Legislature in getting a measure passed to allow for a study of the concept.
The group created by Assembly Bill 227, the Nevada Land Management Task Force, has been charged with evaluating whether the state should consider taking over control of some of the public lands now managed by federal agencies, including the Bureau of Land Management, which controls 76 percent of the land in the state.
The task force will submit its findings to the Legislative Committee on Public Lands by Sept. 1.
Nevada voters should tell the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House to end the discrimination against Nevada and release the “unappropriated territory” to the management and ownership of their own state government.
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http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/1aac4e0...6%3Fs%3D70&r=G About Jonathon Moseley
Jonathon Moseley is a Board member of the Northern Virginia Tea Party, and Executive Director of American Border Control. He served as Executive Director of the Legal Affairs Council.
The opinions expressed by our contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of BizPac Review.
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Enabling Act of 1802
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Enabling Act of 1802 was passed on April 30, 1802 by the Seventh Congress of the United States. This act authorized the residents of the eastern portion of the Northwest Territory to form the state of Ohio and join the U.S. on an equal footing with the other states. To accomplish this, and in doing so, the act also established the precedent and procedures for creation of future states in the western territories. The Enabling Act of 1802 would be the first appropriation by Congress for internal improvements[1] in the country's interior.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...e-logo.svg.png Wikisource has original text related to this article: Enabling act for Ohio 1802
Ohio was the first state to be created out of the Northwest Territories, which had been established by the Northwest Ordinance on July 13, 1787 in an act of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation. The Northwest Ordinance laid out the conditions for the development and creation of states from the territory. With the act of May 7, 1800, the eastern part of the Northwest Territory, Ohio was set off under a distinct territorial government, and the remainder was organized as the territory of Indiana.[2] By 1802 Ohio, in the eastern division of the Northwest Territories, had reached a population of 60,000 and was entitled to begin the transition to statehood. The Enabling Act of 1802 set forth the legal mechanisms and authorized the people of Ohio to begin this process.
The act required the people of Ohio to elect a delegate for each 1,200 people to attend a constitutional convention. These delegates would meet in Chillicothe on November 1, 1802, and would decide by majority vote whether or not to form a constitution and state government, and, if so, either provide for the election of representatives for a constitutional convention or to proceed immediately with the matter.
The new constitution and government of Ohio was required only to be "republican, and not repugnant to the ordinance of the thirteenth of July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven, between the original States and the people and States of the territory northwest of the river Ohio." The new state was to be equal in status to the existing states, and would have only one Representative to the United States House of Representatives until the next census. The help provide that equal status, section seven of the act offered three "propositions" to the convention for their free acceptance or rejection, which, if accepted, would be obligatory upon the United States; these granted certain lands held by the Federal government to the new state, notably those set aside for public schools, and provided that 5% of the proceeds from sale of Federal lands would fund creations of roads to and through Ohio.
The convention met from November 1 to 29; it agreed to form a state, accepted the several land-use proposals, and wrote the Ohio Constitution of 1802, which went into force without submission to popular vote. On February 19, 1803, Congress recognized the State of Ohio. This act did not purport to admit the state, but declared that Ohio, by the formation of its constitution in pursuance of the act of April 30, 1802, "has become one of the United States of America."[2] This inconsistency would be corrected in the 1950s.
Significance and growth
Along with the extensively discussed topic of internal improvements, the entry of Ohio into the Union in 1802 raised the issue of whether the United States or Ohio should control the public lands in the territory. In a major precedent, the older states retained for the Union full sovereignty over these lands but agreed to allocate 5 percent of the net proceeds of land sales in Ohio for building roads to and through the state.[3] The Enabling Act of 1802 specifically stated that the 5% portion should,
"be applied to the laying out and making public roads, leading from the navigable waters emptying into the Atlantic, to the Ohio, to the said State, and through the same, such roads to be laid out under the authority of Congress, with the consent of the several States through which the road shall pass." This statement within the Enabling Act of 1802 foreshadowed the Cumberland Road, which was built to fulfill the promise to use a portion of the money accruing from the sale of public lands in Ohio in order to connect that young state with Atlantic waters;[4] the road would be approved in 1806[3] and would later extend nearly to the Mississippi River.
In the act of March 3, 1803, which add and modified the propositions contained in the Enabling Act,[5] 3 per cent of the net proceeds of land sales was given to Ohio for roads within the State, and for no other purpose whatever.[1]
Similar provisions for a grant of 5 per cent of the net proceeds of the sales of public lands within each State have been made in the subsequent acts for the admission of the various public-land States[6] to the Union. In the different acts there is some variation in the purposes for which the grants were made. The early acts usually made the appropriation for roads and canals; acts after 1836 made the proceeds available for roads and internal improvements; and the act for Nevada (1864) applied it to roads and irrigation ditches. Beginning with the four States admitted in 1889, the proceeds of this 5 per cent grant have been granted as a permanent fund for the support of common schools.[1] Between 1802 and 1860, inclusive, this method of revenue sharing returned $5.4 million to the states;[3] by 1887 the amounts accruing to the various States for the proceeds of the cash sales of public lands aggregated $7,123,550.[1]
References
- United States Inland Waterways Commission, Preliminary Report, 1908, Government aid to inland navigation
- Cyclopędia of Political Science, Political Economy, and the Political History of the United States, by the Best American and European Writers Lalor, John J., (Ed.), 1899. Ohio
- Stephen Minicucci, Internal Improvements and the Union, 1790–1860, Studies in American Political Development, Vol 18, Issue 2: p.160-185, (October 2004), Cambridge University Press, DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X04000094
- Archer B. Hulbert, The Paths of Inland Commerce, A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The Chronicles of America Series. Editor: Allen Johnson (1921)
- “An act in addition to, and in modification of, the propositions contained in the act entitled 'An act to enable the People of the Eastern division of the Territory Northwest of the river Ohio, to form a Constitution and State Government, and for the admission of such State into the Union, on an equal footing with the original States; and for other purposes”, Library of Congress, Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 1801-1804, Thursday, March 3, 1803.
- Minicucci, “Public land” states is a category for states that excluded [the original 13 states plus] Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee before Ohio was admitted, and Texas after.
External links
Categories:
- 1802 in law
- United States federal territory and statehood legislation
- Pre-statehood history of Ohio
- 1802 in the United States
- 7th United States Congress
- Ohio Constitutional Convention (1802)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1802
Nevada Statehood
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Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-113141 (b&w film copy neg.).
Side view of portico of Nevada state Capitol building in Carson City, circa 1920.
The first push to make Nevada Territory a state originated from within the territory, without prior authorization from Congress. On September 2, 1863 the voters of the territory approved of the concept of statehood by the overwhelming margin of 6,660 votes to only 1,502. To implement this, on November 2, 1863, thirty-nine delegates met to draft a state constitution. Since the great majority of the delegates had come to Nevada by way of California, they used the California state constitution as a first draft in formulating their own document. On December 11, 1863 the newly written constitution was submitted to the voters who, on January 19, 1864 surprisingly rejected it by a crushing 8,851 to 2,157 vote. There were a variety of reasons why it was rejected, including the idea that the taxation of mines, as established in the newly written constitution, was deemed too unfavorable for the mine owners.
Yet the idea of statehood did not die; instead it was immediately taken up on the national level, and a new attempt to create a state of Nevada was started in the United States Congress. An enabling act for Nevada statehood was passed just before the Thirty-eighth Congress was to go into recess, and signed by President Lincoln on March 21, 1864, which set up the procedure for future admission. This enabling act stated that Nevada would achieve statehood when and if it wrote an acceptable constitution, which would include certain stipulated provisions. The constitution would be reviewed by the President, and, if approved, Nevada would be admitted. The procedure was constitutionally odd, in that Congress was left out of it; it was up to the territory and to the President to implement the required ideas. But there was haste to insure that Nevada would become a state before the next meeting of the congress.
There were reasons for both the rush to have a Nevada state, and for the irregular procedure. First, it was at a time when the nation was fighting a desperately fought Civil War, and Nevada Territory was universally and correctly perceived to be both pro-Unionist and strongly Republican. Thus, despite other territories having considerably more population, Nevada was pushed to the head of the line for statehood. As the 1864 Presidential election approached, there were certain perceived advantages in having an additional Republican state. For one thing, a Republican congressional delegation could provide additional votes for the Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery, which earlier had narrowly failed to garner the necessary two thirds support of both houses of Congress. More overriding, however, at least in the spring of 1864 was the real fear that there might be three major candidates running for President that year, and that no party would achieve a majority of electoral votes. Then, as required by the United States constitution, the election would go into the House of Representatives, where each state would have only one vote, and where a Republican Nevada would have voting rights equal to those of populous New York or Pennsylvania. This made the admission of an additional safe Republican state seem quite necessary.
A second convention to write a state constitution therefore met from July 4–27, 1864. The defeated 1863 constitution was used as the basis for the new document. The requirements of the congressional enabling act were duly incorporated at the beginning of the constitution in a section called "The Ordinance." This included the outlawing of slavery, and the statement that all undistributed public lands would be retained by the federal government and could never be taxed by the state. These provisions would be "irrevocable" without the consent of Congress and of the people of Nevada. The new constitution also included a "paramount allegiance" clause, proclaiming the supremacy of the United States government over the states and that no state had the right to secede, both very much Republican party doctrine, and voluntarily inserted into the document by its makers. The 1864 constitution also espoused democratic principles, popular in the West, with popular elections demanded for many state offices, including the state judiciary. Possible opposition from mine owners was headed off by a provision stating that only the net proceeds of mines could be taxed.
This state constitution was overwhelmingly approved by Nevada voters on September 7, 1864, with 10,375 votes supporting it, and a mere 1,184 against. The constitution was telegraphed to Washington, D.C. at a cost of $3,416.77, supposedly the longest and most expensive telegram ever sent up to that time. Lincoln proclaimed Nevada a state on October 31, 1864, and, eight days later, Nevada voted strongly Republican in the Presidential, congressional, and legislative elections. The state surely was "Battle Born" (one of its several state mottoes). The Civil War had been indispensable for giving statehood to one of the least populated and economically viable of all the territories.
Further Reading
Eleanore Bushnell and Don Driggs. The Nevada Constitution: Origin and Growth. Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1984.
David Alan Johnson. Founding the Far West: California, Oregon, and Nevada, 1840-1890. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.
http://www.onlinenevada.org/articles/nevada-statehood
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