Utah to Federal Government: “Give Us Back Our Land”

This oughtta be interesting.  If you like the red states’ lawsuit against Obama’s Affordable Care Act, you’ll love the state of Utah suing the federal government to get their land back.  Who knows, it might even start a chain reaction of red states suing to get “their” land back.

Utah Governor Gary Herbert has signed a bill which demands that the federal government return Utah’s federally-owned public lands back to the state.  That’s about thirty million acres.  This land will have to be returned to Utah by 2015 Or Else.

In 1896, Utah surrendered these lands to the federal government in return for being admitted as a state.  Now stop right there — I know what you’re thinking and the answer is NO.  Utah will NOT secede from the union in return for getting its land back.

Damn it.

The governor has been warned that he has no legal grounds to stand on, but he insists this is “a fight worth having.”  He said:

“The Bureau of Land Management has more control over our state than the governor.”

Who needs a bunch of sissy national parks and wildlife preserves when that land could be used for something productive?  There are minerals to mine, golf courses to build; there’s oil to be drilled, natural gas to be fracked, trees to be cut down.  That land is just sitting there, doing nothing, and we want to USE it for something.

As somebody commented at the end of the linked article, this land used to belong to the Indians; maybe Utah should give it back to them.