Our perusal of this morning’s news made us feel like we had fallen into a time machine. It seems that some folks in Colorado are upset with the U.S. Army’s ambitions to acquire more land in the Piñyon Canyon area in southeastern Colorado. The local ranchers are understandably upset about the prospect of losing their range land on which they run some 400,000 head of cattle. The Army’s current Piñyon Canyon Maneuver Site covers some 250,000 acres, giving Fort Carson one of the Army’s highest land-per-brigade ratios. So the local ranchers figure that’s enough.
But the Army thinks otherwise and is coveting additional land in the area. So the ranchers have turned to their state government which has responded by state legislation prohibiting the sale of land for that Maneuver site. Ah, but what about the feds’ power of eminent domain? The Colorado legislators have thought about that too (or at least they think they have) and have directed the Colorado Attorney General to “uphold Colorado law and to withhold [sic] any attempt by the Army to condemn” that land which has been state owned since Colorado became a state, and which is now largely leased to those ranchers.
Alas, we have sad news for those plucky Westerners who don’t intend to take any crap from the feds. It’s been tried before, and the results weren’t pretty. In United States v. Carmack, 329 U.S. 230, 240 (1946), the Supreme Court was faced with a similar argument (that the feds could not take by eminent domain land being put to state public use), and it responded as follows:
“The argument based upon the doctrine that the states have the eminent domain or highest dominion in the lands comprised within their limits, and that the United States have no dominion in such lands, cannot avail to frustrate the supremacy given by the constitution to the government of the United States in all matters within the scope of its sovereignty. This is not a matter of words, but of things. If it is necessary that the United States government should have an eminent domain still higher than that of the state, in order that it may fully carry out the objects and purposes of the constitution, then it has it. Whatever may be the necessities or conclusions of theoretical law as to eminent domain or anything else, it must be received as a postulate of the constitution that the government of the United States is invested with full and complete power to execute and carry out its purposes.”
So stay tuned, folks. Piñyon Canyon is unlikely to become another Fort Sumter, but if those Coloradans stick to their guns (figuratively speaking, of course) this should prove to be an interesting controversy if and when it reaches the courts.