The BLM doesn’t own any of the land. The Fed, in reality based on original intent, manages the land until it is disposed of, and it is intended to be disposed of.
Yeah, but they dispose of it to foreign entities while lining their own pockets by selling out America.
Found this case the other day while creating that custom database I told you about. It seems relevant/related to our ongoing discussion about federal land ownership. (Please ping anyone I missed.)
Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States
The Supreme Court sided today with a Wyoming landowner who challenged the Forest Service's construction of a bicycle trail on an abandoned railway that slices through his property.Excellent summary.By an 8-1 vote, the justices held in Marvin Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States that the government had no right to Brandt's Fox Park tract once the railroad formally abandoned the property around 2004. The decision reverses a lower federal appellate court ruling in favor of the Forest Service.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, classified the railroad right of way as an easement that reverted back to Brandt when the railroad pulled up its ties.
The government, Roberts wrote, lost because of its arguments in a previous Supreme Court case -- 1942's Great Northern Railway Co. v. United States. That case centered on whether railroads were given rights to subsurface minerals when the government granted a right of way.
The government won in that case by arguing that railroads didn't get mineral rights and classified rights of way as easements, meaning a temporary right to cross the land.
The court "cannot overlook the irony," Roberts said, of the government now basing its arguments on other Supreme Court cases.
"The government loses that argument today, in large part because it won when it argued the opposite before this court more than 70 years ago," he wrote.
"Those basic common law principles resolve this case. When the Wyoming and Colorado Railroad abandoned the right of way in 2004, the easement referred to in the Brandt patent terminated. Brandt's land became unburdened of the easement, conferring on him the same full rights over the right of way as he enjoyed over the rest of the Fox Park parcel."
(...)
"The chief may have taken this opinion to send a message to the [solicitor general] that it should not be making arguments that depend on a complete about-face from prior arguments that have formed the basis for long-standing precedent," said Tim Bishop of Mayer Brown, a Supreme Court industry advocate who's not involved in the Brandt case. "Someone at [the Department of Justice] should have stood up to [the Bureau of Land Management] and Interior and explained that there was no plausible basis for arguing that the right of way was more than an easement."