Three Ways That Nevada Rancher and His Right-Wing Militia Supporters Could Wind Up Behind Bars

By Ian Millhiser, ThinkProgress

15 April 14

evada rancher Cliven Bundy speaks like a man from another century. In an interview with conservative radio host Dana Loesch, Bundy claims that “this is a sovereign state of Nevada.” Though he swears that he will “abide by all of Nevada state laws,” he adds that “I don’t recognize [the] United States Government as even existing.”

Last week, that idiosyncratic belief nearly triggered a violent conflict with federal officials. For two decades, those officials have tried and failed to keep Bundy from illegally grazing his cattle on federal land. They’ve obtained three court orders — one of them as long ago as 1998 — requiring Bundy to remove his cattle from federal land. The more recent orders, both from 2013, gave Bundy 45 days to comply or else “the United States is entitled to seize and remove to impound any of Bundy’s cattle that remain in trespass.” Bundy did not comply, and government-hired wranglers began rounding up Bundy’s livestock last Saturday.

Egged on by media figures like Fox News’ Sean Hannity and Tea Party groups like the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, Bundy quickly became a conservative celebrity — including among right-wing fringe groups. By Wednesday, right-wing militia members began to arrive in Nevada to “provide armed response” to federal officials seeking to enforce the court order.

As the potential for violence escalated, the feds decided to back down. This Saturday, the Bureau of Land Management stopped rounding up Bundy’s cattle and returned hundreds of animals they had already rounded up to the open range. “Due to escalating tensions,” the BLM explained in a statement, “the cattle have been released from the enclosures in order to avoid violence and help restore order.”

Given Bundy’s rather unusual understanding of the law (at one point, he demanded that the local sheriff disarm all National Park Service employees and bring their firearms to him), the presence of his armed supporters, and the willingness of major conservative outlets to serve as his public relations agents, BLM’s decision to avoid a violent conflict is understandable. Nevertheless, there is an obvious danger to allowing Bundy to get away with two decades of illegal action merely because he was able to muster armed supporters to his cause. If Bundy escapes from this incident without consequence, that sends a pretty clear message that federal law is optional so long as you have enough people with guns backing you up.

Here are three ways that the federal government might ensure that Bundy and at least some of his armed supporters are brought to justice:

1) Contempt of Court:

The normal sanction when a person subject to a court order refuses to comply with it is contempt of court. Contempt, according to a manual provided to federal prosecutors, is “an act of disobedience or disrespect towards the judicial branch of the government, or an interference with its orderly process.” By law, federal courts may “punish by fine or imprisonment, or both” when someone engages in “[d]isobedience or resistance to its lawful writ, process, order, rule, decree, or command.”

As a general rule, courts must “exercise the least possible power to obtain the desired result,” meaning that a federal judge should not issue a sweeping contempt sanction when lesser sanction will suffice to ensure that the person subject to contempt proceedings complies with the court’s order. Nevertheless, the fact that Bundy was willing to defy a court order for 20 years — and that he could rally supporters willing to put up armed resistance to federal law enforcement to his cause — suggests that he would simply ignore any fines that a court imposed on him. A judge may decide that the best way to convince Bundy that the federal government exists is to jail him until he agrees to comply with the court’s order.

2) Criminal Charges for Threats To Federal Officers

Federal law provides that anyone who “threatens to assault, kidnap, or murder, a United States official, a United States judge [or] a Federal law enforcement officer . . . with intent to impede, intimidate, or interfere with such official, judge, or law enforcement officer while engaged in the performance of official duties, or with intent to retaliate against such official, judge, or law enforcement officer on account of the performance of official duties” may be fined or imprisoned for up to 10 years (although a threat to assault carries a maximum sentence of only 6 years). So, if Bundy or his supporters threatened federal officials or law enforcement officers who were enforcing the court order against him, they could have committed a serious crime.

There is one big caveat to this approach, however. Although the First Amendment permits some laws banning threatening language, under the “True Threat” Doctrine, these bans are only permitted when they target “those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” Moreover, at least one older Supreme Court case suggests that threatening language is not a “true threat” when it is made using conditional language. Thus, for example, if Bundy said something like “if you Feds don’t get off this land in two days, I will kill every last one of you,” that may not constitute a true threat because he placed a condition on what the federal officials would have to do before he killed them.

Among legal scholars, the current state of the True Threat Doctrine is widely viewed as incoherent, so there is some uncertainty about which kinds of threatening statements could form the basis of a prosecution against Bundy and his supporters.

3) Criminal Charges Against Militia Members Who Brought Guns To Nevada

Another federal law provides that “[w]hoever transports or manufactures for transportation in commerce any firearm, or explosive or incendiary device, knowing or having reason to know or intending that the same will be used unlawfully in furtherance of a civil disorder” may be fined or imprisoned for up to five years. This statute could potentially form the basis for criminal charges against some of the militia members who traveled to Nevada with their guns in order to support Bundy. In order to convict someone charged under this law, federal prosecutors would need to prove that the militia member transported their gun with reason to know that it would be used “unlawfully in furtherance of a civil disorder,” so this statute could not be used against someone who had no reason to suspect that they were traveling towards anything other than a peaceful protest. A civil disorder is defined as “any public disturbance involving acts of violence by assemblages of three or more persons, which causes an immediate danger of or results in damage or injury to the property or person of any other individual.”

At least some of Bundy’s supporters made statements to the press suggesting that they fully intended to use their weapons to further such a disorder. One militia member, for example, said that he was at the ranch to provide “armed response,” adding that “[w]e need guns to protect ourselves from the tyrannical government.” Similarly, a message purporting to be from one militia organization that was published on several right-wing websites announced that “[w]e have made the decision to mobilize to Nevada” and concluded with a fairly explicit statement suggesting that the purpose of this mobilization was to spark a deadly conflict: “All men are mortal, most pass simply because it is their time, a few however are blessed with the opportunity to chose their time in performance of duty.”

Four Ways Our Tax Dollars Pay for Rich People's Toys

By Carl Gibson, Reader Supported News

14 April 14

fter losing all of my belongings in a fire, I still ended up owing the IRS a few hundred dollars. In the grand scheme of all taxes paid, that’s barely a drop in the Olympic-size swimming pool of tax revenue, yet it’s a significant cost to people in my situation.

While going through all the deductions I could claim, I was forced to leave blank all the slots available for purchasing a second home, buying a boat, drilling for oil, selling stocks, borrowing money to buy stocks, inheriting wealth, or having money in foreign bank accounts. People scraping by to make a living don’t have the money to purchase a second home or buy a few thousand shares of stock, and pay about a third of their income in taxes.

1. Frivolous Hobbies

While self-employed freelancers have to pony up nickels and dimes to pay the man, a multi-millionaire was able to write off $77,000 in deductions for a dancing horse in 2010. Romney classified his horse, Rafalca, as a "business," allowing the cost of the horse's training, stable fees, and grooming to be charged to the government. To compare, 256.6 freelancers who made $22,000 and had to write a $300 check to the Treasury Department would all pay for one extremely rich individual’s dancing horse.

2. Lavish Homes

The IRS allows people who buy million-dollar homes to qualify for the mortgage interest deduction, to where if someone borrows $1.3 million to buy a $1.5 million home, $1.1 million in interest can be deducted. As of 2009, 137,670 people qualified under those circumstances, saving $3,000 apiece. This means $410 million in taxpayer money was spent helping 0.03 percent of the population buy a million-dollar house. If ten people like me who made $22,000 a year and had to write a $300 check to the Treasury Department combined our tax payments, all those checks would pay for one tax break for one person who bought a luxury home.

3. Inherited Fortunes

Our tax system is actually set up so people who earn their money are being bled dry so someone doesn’t have to pay a dime of tax on a gift in excess of $5 million. And the IRS is rapidly changing rules that will make taxes even more cushy on people who inherited their wealth rather than earning it through labor. While the Bush tax cuts of 2001 exempted from estate tax all estates worth $1 million and less, the exemption cutoff has steadily grown over the last decade.

In 2010, there was no estate tax at all. When billionaire New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner died, his heirs paid no taxes on that wealth when they inherited it, which saved them $600 million in estate taxes. This means that when 600,000 working-class households each wrote a $1,000 check to the Treasury Department for the taxes owed on income earned from a year’s worth of hard work in 2010, all of that revenue was cancelled out so a few wealthy heirs could avoid taxes on money they never worked for.

In 2014, estates are now exempt from paying taxes on gifts of less than $5,340,000. This is a $90,000 increase from the 2013 cutoff of $5,250,000. This means 300 people like me, who had to write a check to the Treasury Department for $300, are all paying for one heir’s tax break this year.

The Congressional Budget Office found that if the estate tax were restored to pre-Bush levels, we would rake in an additional $500 billion in ten years. This means we’re currently hemorrhaging $50 billion a year so a few rich brats don’t have to pay taxes on wealth they didn’t earn. To compare that with the rest of America, when 50 million working people write a $1,000 check to the Treasury Department, after showing up to work every day, stressing over rising grocery and heating costs, and worrying about how to put their kids through college, all of those taxes paid are cancelled out so the nation’s wealthiest heirs don’t have to pay taxes on the tremendous wealth that they didn’t have to work one minute for.

4. Corporate Welfare

The most unjust part of our tax system is seen in the tremendous exemptions given to billion-dollar corporations. Twenty-six highly-profitable corporations in the Fortune 500 paid $0 in federal income taxes between 2008 and 2012. Just five companies – AT&T, Verizon, Wells Fargo, IBM, and General Electric – all enjoyed $77 billion in tax breaks during that time period. This means if 10 million Americans all wrote a check to the Treasury Department for $1,540 on taxes owed for a year of hard work, every year, for five years, all of that revenue would be cancelled out by just five extremely wealthy global corporations too greedy to pay for the services they use and depend on every day.

The income tax was set up to be an equitable redistribution of wealth. People would ideally pay a portion of their income to the government, which would then redistribute it so society can function. But as our tax structure is currently working, the masses of working poor who have been working longer hours for less pay over the last several decades are redistributing their income upward, to the people who already have more than they can spend. Working people are being pinched for pennies and threatened by audits, all so the nation’s richest one percent and most profitable corporations can have even more money than they already have.

Imagine all of the good we could do in society if corporations like Verizon and GE no longer had offshore tax havens in which to stash the profits they made in the US. Imagine if hard work was taxed at a preferential rate, investment income was taxed at a higher rate, and inherited wealth was taxed at the highest rate. We would have all the revenue we need to create millions of good-paying jobs, high-quality education for all those who wish to learn, and a strong social safety net to support those on hard times.

America’s wealthiest parasites have been sucking on the public’s teat for long enough. It’s time we vote out their servants in November and have the equitable tax system we deserve.

Carl Gibson, 26, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Carl and other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin. You can contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , and follow him on twitter at @uncutCG.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.