Newspaper column: Trump appeals court nominee looks right for the job

This past Friday President Trump nominated former Nevada Solicitor General Lawrence VanDyke to a seat on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles cases for nine Western states and territories in the Pacific.

As solicitor general, VanDyke served in the office of then-Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt. He also served as solicitor general in Montana and Texas. 

VanDyke earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Montana State University-Bozeman and graduated magna cum laude in 2005 from Harvard Law School, where he was editor of both the Harvard Law Review and Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He is a member of the conservative Federalist Society and currently is a deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division at the Department of Justice.

Nevada’s Democratic U.S. Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen immediately issued a statement sharply critical of the nomination.

Lawrence VanDyke

“We’re frustrated the White House is choosing to ignore the bipartisan work undertaken by our offices in concert with Nevada’s legal community to identify and recommend qualified Nevadans for the Ninth Circuit,” said their statement. “The Administration’s decision to put forward this nominee ignores the broad, consensus-based opinion of Nevadans. Instead, the White House has chosen to move forward on their extreme judicial agenda. While we will review the full record of this nominee, we are disappointed that the White House has chosen to nominate a candidate with a concerning record of ideological legal work.”

Only two days before the two senators had announced the formation of what they called “bipartisan judicial commissions to make recommendations for Nevada’s judicial vacancies,” and said, “We are establishing the commissions to encourage this and future administrations to nominate candidates that reflect the diversity and values of the Silver State.”

Republican President Trump paid no heed whatsoever.

Critics of VanDyke quickly jumped on his record in Montana of advancing friend of the court briefs defending bans on same-sex marriage and abortion, as well as challenges to gun rights. 

The voters of both Montana and Nevada had amended their state constitutions to prohibit same-sex marriage, and in 2014 Montana filed a legal brief defending those amendments before the 9th Circuit. Cortez Masto, then Nevada attorney general, refused to defend the state’s amendment. The 9th Circuit eventually ruled both state’s amendments were unconstitutional.

VanDyke was quoted by a Montana newspaper, while running unsuccessfully for a seat on that state’s Supreme Court, “My job was to represent the interests of the people of Montana and defend our state’s laws. So simply because I worked on a specific case or made a specific recommendation obviously can’t be taken as representative of my personal views. In fact, as Montana’s solicitor general, I worked on cases and took positions that were sometimes at odds with my personal or political views.”

While working under Laxalt, VanDyke was said to be a key figure in securing an injunction staying the Environmental Protection Agencies’s 2015 “Waters of the United States” rule, which unduly expanded federal power over every stream, ditch, seasonal puddle and muddy hoof print as being covered by the restrictions of the Clean Water Act of 1972. 

The conservative National Review also notes that VanDyke’s challenge of the Bureau of Land Management’s over-broad greater sage grouse land plan caused the agency to back off. The plan would have withdrawn more than 10 million acres of federal public land from use for such things as grazing and mineral exploration. He also challenged the Obama-era EPA’s Clean Power Plan that threatened to raise power bills.

“VanDyke also litigated in defense of the Second Amendment and religious freedom,” the National Review article continues. “He filed the multi-state amicus briefs at both the circuit and Supreme Court level in the Trinity Lutheran case. He was also part of the successful multi-state challenge to the Obama administration’s DAPA program, which attempted to legalize and grant numerous benefits to over 4 million illegal aliens without statutory authority. As the lead lawyer for a 22-state coalition, he successfully challenged the Obama administration’s Overtime Rule.”

Sounds like the kind of person who could help change the future rulings of the once uber-liberal 9th Circuit.

A version of this column appeared this week in many of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel and the Lincoln County Record — and the Elko Daily Free Press.

Editorial: Rip the veil of secrecy from the Bundy case

Bunkerville standoff (Reuters pix)

Justice must not only be done, but it must be seen to be done.

The wheels of justice continue to grind in the federal criminal case against Cliven Bundy, four of his sons and a dozen co-defendants over the April 2014 armed standoff with federal agents trying to confiscate Bundy’s cattle at his Bunkerville ranch. All of the defendants have been jailed for more than a year.

The standoff occurred after armed Bureau of Land Management agents attempted to roundup Bundy’s cattle after he had refused for 20 years to pay grazing fees in the Gold Butte area. The BLM said he owed $1 million in fees and penalties.

Faced with armed protesters the BLM agents eventually released the cattle and left to avoid potential bloodshed.

Much of the evidence in the high-profile case remains cloaked in secrecy due to a blanket court protective order that requires just about everything filed in the case must be filed under seal.

But the press — specifically the Las Vegas daily newspaper, this newspaper and The Associated Press — continue to fight for openness. Just this past week attorney Maggie McLetchie filed a writ with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asking that the veil of secrecy be lifted, because it “is anathema to the First Amendment” and longstanding court precedent from the 9th Circuit itself.

McLetchie argues, among other things, that much of the rationale for keeping material secret is merely to protect government agents from legitimate criticism of their conduct. She also says the protective order is  based on “speculation and scaremongering” supported almost entirely by a series of years-old online social media posts.

Since the arrests of most of the defendants back in February 2016, things have not gone swimmingly for the government.

Two of Bundy’s sons, who had been arrested on separate but similar charges of illegally occupying an Oregon wildlife refuge to protest the jailing of father and son ranchers under a terrrorism law for letting fires get out of control and burn a few acres of federal public land, were acquitted of those charges this past fall by a jury, along with their co-defendants.

In April, the first of three scheduled trials for the Bunkerville defendants — charged with obstruction of justice, conspiracy, extortion, assault and impeding federal officers — ended in a mistrial. The jury found only two of six people on trial guilty of some charges but deadlocked on the others. The jurors agreed to convict on only 10 of the 60 charges brought. None of the conspiracy charges stuck.

In January, the Interior Department’s Inspector General released a 16-page investigative report outlining misconduct and ethical violations by the BLM agent who supervised the Bundy cattle roundup. The report never named the agent but said he abused his powers by obtaining preferential treatment for family and friends at the 2015 Burning Man event on BLM land, misused BLM personnel and equipment, improperly intervened in hiring a BLM agent and attempted to influence an employee’s testimony during the Inspector General’s investigation of him.

News accounts identify the agent as Dan Love.

McLetchie noted that the misconduct allegations add fuel to the “general public’s concern that the government mishandled the investigation in this case.”

Her writ quotes from a 9th Circuit ruling from 1983 in which The Associated Press sought information about a criminal case. The court stated there “can be little dispute that the press and public have historically had a common law right of access to most pretrial documents. … Moreover, pretrial documents, such as those dealing with the question whether [a defendant] should be incarcerated prior to trial and those containing allegations by [a defendant] of government misconduct, are often important to a full understanding of the way in which ‘the judicial process and the government as a whole are functioning.’”

Seems on point for the Bundy case.

The defendants from the first Bundy trial are to be retried in late June on the same day Cliven Bundy, his sons and others were scheduled for trial. The court has yet to say what the schedule will be for the long-jailed remaining defendants.

The court needs to shine more light on this case so the public can see whether justice is being done.

A version of this editorial appeared this week in some of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel,  Sparks Tribune and the Lincoln County Record.

 

Wild horse lawsuit dismissal outcome is in the eye of the beholder

The lede on the AP story about the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejecting a lawsuit intended to force the federal agencies in Nevada to actually to do their jobs and reduce the wild horse overpopulation reads:

“Wild horse advocates in Nevada scored a victory Monday in an ongoing legal battle with rural interests they say want to round up federally protected mustangs across the West and sell them for slaughter.”

The lede could just as easily have reported that Nevada ranchers had the value of their grazing rights unconstitutionally taken due to a hair-splitting technicality, a sort of Catch-22. The suit from the Nevada Association of Counties, the Nevada Farm Bureau Federation and others asked the courts to requiring federal agencies to follow the wild horse and burro law, because its failure to do so is starving the very wild horses the law was intended to protect, as well as damaging range land used for grazing and taking private water rights. (9th Circuit wild horse opinion)

Just as a Nevada federal judge had ruled, the 9th Circuit said the plaintiffs failed to cite a “final action” by the land agencies that could be challenged:

The district court did not err in dismissing NACO’s APA (Administrative Procedure Act) claims. Federal courts lack jurisdiction over an APA claim that “does not challenge final agency action.” … Here, NACO has failed to identify a specific final agency action … or discrete action unlawfully withheld … that allegedly harmed it. Instead, NACO seeks judicial oversight and direction of virtually the entire federal wild horse and burro management program … in Nevada. This sort of programmatic challenge is foreclosed under the APA.

That is because there is never a “final agency action.” Everything is fluid, flexible, changeable, appealable. What the Bureau of Land Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service do is deny and delay.

It is not entirely the land agencies fault. They are aided and abetted by Congress.

The Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971, which NACO and others say is being ignored, specially says, “The Secretary (of Interior) shall cause additional excess wild free roaming horses and burros for which an adoption demand by qualified individuals does not exist to be destroyed in the most humane and cost efficient manner possible.”

But the federal budget every year since 2009, has stated, “Appropriations herein made shall not be available for the destruction of healthy, unadopted, wild horses and burros in the care of the Bureau or its contractors or for the sale of wild horses and burros that results in their destruction for processing into commercial products.”

The BLM itself reported in September that the population population of free ranging wild horses and burros was 67,000, even thought the range could sustain a population of no more than 26,700 animals, which means that there insufficient grazing for the horses as well as cattle and sheep.

The AP story quoted two different horse-bugging groups but could not find any ranches to quote.

Nick Lawton, a lawyer for one of the horse lovers was quoted as saying, “We’re pleased that the courts continue to dismiss attempts by these grazing interests to use the judicial system to rewrite federal law that Congress designed to protect wild horses from capture, not to favor the livestock industry.”

The original lawsuit pointed out, “Free-roaming horse and burro herds in Nevada are frequently observed to be in malnourished condition, with the ribs and skeletal features of individual animals woefully on view and other signs of ill-health readily observable.”

Now, who is being humane?

Stallions fighting (Getty Images file photo)

 

 

 

Newspaper column: One judge’s bias is another’s hard-earned experience

Wayne Hage in 1997 AP file photo via R-J

Earlier this month a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals printed out for the various federal public land agencies in the West a license to steal.

The court kicked the quarter-century-old fight between the Pine Creek Ranch near Tonopah and federal land managers back to the federal court in Nevada, ordering the court to assess damages against the ranch for allowing its cattle to trespass on federal land and ordering the judge who sided with the ranch owners two years ago to be removed from the case, claiming he was biased. It also threw out contempt citations the judge had handed two federal employees.

At one point the Hage family, which owns the ranch, was awarded $14 million by a federal judge because the government actions amounted to a “taking” of the value of the ranch’s grazing and water rights, but an appellate court said the case was “not ripe” because the family had not exhausted all administrative appeals. In a sort of Catch 22, the 9th Circuit said the statute of limitations had run out on such claims.

In a scathing opinion, Circuit Court Judge Susan Graber accused Nevada federal court Judge Robert Jones of bias against the federal agencies.

Graber wrote that Jones harbored animus toward the federal agencies. As evidence of this she quoted him as saying during a hearing, “In my opinion, not only in this case but in many cases, the government has been all too ready to — in the name of revoking or suspending or limiting grazing licenses, the government has been all too ready in the history of Nevada to impair otherwise suspected and substantiated rights of landowners.”

One person’s alleged bias is another’s expression of hard-earned experience. As can be attested to by many ranchers across Nevada, that is precisely how many agents of the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service too often behave.

In 1978, E. Wayne Hage bought the Pine Creek Ranch and its 7,000 acres of private land and grazing permits for 752,000 acres of federal public land, as well as water rights. His clash with the federal agencies soon began. In 1983 alone he received 40 letters from and 70 visits by the U.S. Forest Service alleging violations of grazing permits. One notice gave the family five days to replace a single fence post staple on a mountain a 20-mile horseback ride away.

Hage died in 2006 and his son now runs the ranch and continues the legal battle.

Hage was criminally convicted for damaging and removing government owned trees while repairing his water channels, but the conviction was overturned by the 9th Circuit. Twice the feds fenced off the ranch’s water sources, and twice confiscated and sold Hage’s cattle.

In a 104-page ruling Judge Jones accused government officials of entering into “a literal, intentional conspiracy to deprive the Hages not only of their permits but also of their vested water rights. This behavior shocks the conscience …”

He further stated that the government had interfered in the case by urging others to apply for Hage’s grazing permits, by applying themselves for Hage’s water rights and by issuing trespass notices against witnesses soon after they had testified.

The appellate court shrugged off this behavior by saying the agents “took lawful actions, within the scope of their statutory and regulatory obligations, that had no effect whatsoever on the case before the court.”

Jones had ruled that the ranch had a right to allow its cattle to access its water rights and that grazing near the water was incidental, awarding damages to the government for that grazing of $165.88.

In the 2013 trial a forest ranger actually testified in his deposition that despite the right to use water, there was no right to access it. He said someone with water rights but no grazing permit would have to lower a cow from the air to drink the water.

The San Francisco-based judges dismissed any notion that the Hage family had any right to access their own water, if while en route they graze. You can lead a cow to water but you can’t let it graze.

an attorney for the Hage estate, has said he plans to challenge the decision, either by asking for a rehearing by a larger panel of the 9th Circuit or by seeking a U.S. Supreme Court review.

Perhaps the Nevada federal judge who next handles this hot potato should award the government their $165.88 in damages.

A version of this column appears this week in the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel, the Lincoln County Record and the Sparks Tribune — and the Elko Daily Free Press.

What is the law of the land when it comes to public lands in Nevada?

Cliven Bundy. (Getty Images)

Now that the federal standoff with Cliven Bundy over his grazing cattle on public lands without paying grazing fees is at a hiatus, perhaps it is time to once again look at a couple of aspects of the legal arguments.

Bundy claims the federal government is wrongly claiming land that should be controlled by the state of Nevada and/or Clark County.

He lost that argument in federal court when Judge Lloyd George ruled against all his arguments by citing findings in a similar case out of Elko County by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court ruled against rancher Clifford Gardner who had been running cattle on Forest Service land without paying a grazing fee. He was told to keep cattle off the land for a certain period after a wildfire.

Here is a footnote from that case:

“Gardners point out that Nevada recently passed a statute claiming ownership over all public lands within its boundaries, Nev.Rev.Stat. 321.5973. Gardners claim that the passage of this law further demonstrates that title to the public lands in Nevada properly rests in the state, not the federal, government. Gardners fail to note, however, that the Nevada statute by its own terms excludes national forest lands from the public lands claimed by Nevada.   See Nev.Rev.Stat. § 321.5963.”

Yes, the statute excluded “congressionally authorized national parks, monuments, national forests or wildlife refuges.”

But Bundy is grazing his cattle on BLM land. Whether that would have made a difference to the 9th Circuit is unknown.

In 1996, more than 56 percent of Nevada voters agree to remove from the state Constitution the so-called Disclaimer Clause under which the residents of the territory agreed to essentially deed all unappropriated land inside the future state to the federal government, though it said that land “shall be sold,” with 5 percent of proceeds going to the state.

Here is what was voted on in 1996. Note the portion with the strike-through:

SENATE JOINT RESOLUTION – Proposing to amend the ordinance of the Nevada constitution to repeal the disclaimer of interest of the state in unappropriated public lands.

WHEREAS, The State of Nevada has a strong moral claim upon the public land retained by the Federal Government within Nevada’s borders; and

WHEREAS, On October 31, 1864, the Territory of Nevada was admitted to statehood on the condition that it forever disclaim all right and title to unappropriated public land within its boundaries; and

WHEREAS, Nevada received the least amount of land, 2,572,478 acres, and the smallest percentage of its total area, 3.9 percent, of the land grant states in the Far West admitted after 1864, while states of comparable location and soil, including Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, received approximately 11 percent of their total area in federal land grants; and

WHEREAS, The State of Texas, when admitted to the Union in 1845, retained ownership of all unappropriated land within its borders; and

WHEREAS, The federal holdings in the State of Nevada constitute 86.7 percent of the area of the state, and in Esmeralda, Lincoln, Mineral, Nye and White Pine counties the Federal Government controls from 97 to 99 percent of the land; and

WHEREAS, The federal jurisdiction over the public domain is shared among several federal agencies or departments which causes problems concerning the proper management of the land and disrupts the normal relationship between a state, its residents and its property; and

WHEREAS, The intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States was to guarantee to each of the states sovereignty over all matters within its boundaries except for those powers specifically granted to the United States as agent of the states; and

WHEREAS, The exercise of dominion and control of the public lands within the State of Nevada by the United States works a severe, continuous and debilitating hardship upon the people of the State of Nevada; now, therefore, be it

RESOLVED BY THE SENATE AND ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF NEVADA, JOINTLY, That the ordinance of the constitution of the State of Nevada be amended to read as follows:

In obedience to the requirements of an act of the Congress of the United States, approved March twenty-first, A.D. eighteen hundred and sixty-four, to enable the people of Nevada to form a constitution and state government, this convention, elected and convened in obedience to said enabling act, do ordain as follows, and this ordinance shall be irrevocable, without the consent of the United States and the people of the State of Nevada:

First.  That there shall be in this state neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, otherwise than in the punishment for crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.

Second.  That perfect toleration of religious sentiment shall be secured, and no inhabitant of said state shall ever be molested, in person or property, on account of his or her mode of religious worship.

Third.  That the people inhabiting said territory do agree and declare, that [they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within said territory, and that the same shall be and remain at the sole and entire disposition of the United States; and that] lands belonging to citizens of the United States, residing without the said state, shall never be taxed higher than the land belonging to the residents thereof; and that no taxes shall be imposed by said state on lands or property therein belonging to, or which may hereafter be purchased by, the United States, unless otherwise provided by the Congress of the United States.

And be it further

RESOLVED, That the Legislature of the State of Nevada hereby urges the Congress of the United States to consent to the amendment of the ordinance of the Nevada constitution to remove the disclaimer concerning the right of the Federal Government to sole and entire disposition of the unappropriated public lands in Nevada; and be it further

RESOLVED, That, upon approval and ratification of the amendment proposed by this resolution by the people of the State of Nevada, copies of this resolution be prepared and transmitted by the Secretary of the Senate to the Vice President of the United States as presiding officer of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and each member of the Nevada Congressional Delegation; and be it further

RESOLVED, That this resolution becomes effective upon passage and approval, except that, notwithstanding any other provision of law, the proposed amendment to the ordinance of the constitution of the State of Nevada, if approved and ratified by the people of the State of Nevada, does not become effective until the Congress of the United States consents to the amendment or upon a legal determination that such consent is not necessary.

Neither Congress nor the courts have taken any action in 18 years. They’ve basically thumbed their collective noses at the voters of Nevada. If a vote of the people is ignored for 18 years, could it be argued that it has become law by default? Silence constitutes consent.

Now, as for what powers the sheriffs of various counties might have, here is what the 9th Circuit said about the police powers reversed to the state’s under the 10th Amendment:

“Gardners argue that federal ownership of the public lands in Nevada is unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment. Such ownership, they argue, invades ‘core state powers reserved to Nevada,’ such as the police power.

“Federal ownership of the public lands within a state does not completely divest the state from the ability to exercise its own sovereignty over that land.   The state government and the federal government exercise concurrent jurisdiction over the land. In Kleppe v. New Mexico, the Supreme Court held that the Wild Free-roaming Horses and Burros Act was not an impermissible intrusion on the sovereignty of New Mexico. … In so doing, the Court noted:

“Absent consent or cession a State undoubtedly retains jurisdiction over federal lands within its territory, but Congress equally surely retains the power to enact legislation respecting those lands pursuant to the Property Clause. [citations omitted] And when Congress so acts, the federal legislation necessarily overrides conflicting state laws under the Supremacy Clause.

“Indeed, a state may enforce its criminal and civil laws on federal land ‘so long as those laws do not conflict with federal law.’ … The state of Nevada, then, is not being unconstitutionally deprived of the ability to govern the land within its borders. The state may exercise its civil and criminal jurisdiction over federal lands within its borders as long as it exercises its power in a manner that does not conflict with federal law.”

What could the sheriff have done to keep the peace?