Oregon Sheriff Stands Against Feds & Wants All Sheriffs To Do So

“The Constitution is clear on who has police and legislative powers. Those executive orders are not law,” said Gilbertson.

And while FLPMA is a congressionally passed statute, it delegates undue powers to the agencies. “Congress cannot give an agency the ability to write rules and regulations and enforce them as if they were law,” he said. “Congress has to do that. These agencies write their own rules and regulations as they go along and enforce these as law.”

“The big issue, as I see it,” he continued, “is that all these things combine. You have DEQ, EPA, all these federal entities. And as all these federal agencies evolved over the years, there’s been mission creep. They decided, well, we need to fix this; this gives us more powers, and so forth, so we’ll just write down more rules and regulations. They were allowed to get away with it for whatever reason, and now they enforce those as laws. But it’s clearly stated that that can’t be done -- I spelled that out in my document,” he said.

Moreover, “Forest reserves were not federal enclaves subject to the doctrine of exclusive legislative jurisdiction of the United States. Local peace officers were to exercise civil and criminal process over these lands. Forest Service rangers were not law enforcement officers unless designated as such by state authority.”

The federal government sees it otherwise, so in addition to expanding claims for general regulatory power agencies like the Forest Service are attempting to extend the reach of law enforcement authority – a matter that adds to Gilbertson’s concerns.

“The U.S. Forest Service and BLM are really stepping outside their authority in that the Constitution does not give them that,” he observed. “The Tenth Amendment clearly reserves police rights to the states.”

Law Enforcement Power Grab

Sheriffs in other counties have taken note of this development. In his report Gilbertson refers to a one-page position paper by the Western States Sheriffs’ Association that concurs with his observations, and in fact grew from his earlier one. He writes, quoting from the WSSA statement: