American Letter: Oregon stand-off highlights frustration of far right

The further right you go on the Republican flank, the greater the dislike of Washington and big government grows.

Closer to the centre, presidential candidates want to reduce the size of the US government by tackling ballooning social welfare programmes and federal spending they so despise.

Moving right, the contenders want to go further, repealing Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, the law extending health insurance to millions of Americans, and even eliminating whole swathes of the federal government.

Conservative rabble-rouser Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, has promised to abolish five government agencies, including the country's tax collector, the IRS, and the Department of Education, if he is elected president in the November ballot.

Even Marco Rubio, another freshman senator running for the White House who holds more moderate positions compared with his Republican rivals, has drifted out towards Cruz and Donald Trump territory, drawn to the right by their populist appeal among angry conservatives. Rubio suggested this week at a town-hall meeting in Iowa, the first state in the country to pick nominees, that he didn't think the country needed a federal Department of Education.

Where politicians seek to dismantle government brick by brick, others are more radical in their anti-government crusade.

Armed siege

This week, on the snowy plains of eastern Oregon in the western

United States

, Ammon Bundy led a small group of armed anti-federalist militia men. They laid siege to more than a dozen buildings that are the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a nature sanctuary created by President

Theodore Roosevelt

in 1908.

This confrontation between Washington and the west is typical of the battle being raged by conservatives across the country frustrated with a gridlocked legislature and liberal president.

In Congress they managed to unseat the speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner last year because he compromised too much and was unable to tame a small band of rebel congressmen. It is hard to govern when success for a certain group of politicians is disrupting the business of governing.

On the other side of the country, Bundy and his band of anti-government extremists are equally nihilistic. They see themselves as patriots upholding, as they view it, a US Constitution that prohibits the government in Washington from owning this land.

The Bundy family name is long associated with the anti-federalist movement. Ammon’s father Cliven made national headlines two years ago when his decades-long disagreement with the US Bureau of Land Management escalated to an armed stand-off in April 2014 over his right to graze cattle on federally-owned land in Nevada.

The siege in Oregon has, as on that occasion, drawn a media juggernaut. In nearby Burns, a town of fewer than 3,000 people, most residents want the protest to end. While they object to the men’s tactics at a town-hall meeting on Wednesday night, locals agree with their message and believe their protest has shone a national spotlight on the concerns of locals unhappy with land rights issues and the decline of the timber industry in Oregon.

The goal of the group’s occupation, which began last Saturday, is to see the Oregon refuge and millions of acres in the west returned to its rightful owners, “the people” – state and county governments.

The conflict began when the group held a peaceful protest in support of two local ranchers, Dwight Hammond Jr and his son Steven who were convicted of setting federal lands on fire.

They were sentenced to a year or less in prison in 2012 for arson but government prosecutors successfully appealed the sentence saying they should receive a minimum of five years. They handed themselves over to the authorities on Monday to serve the remainder of their sentences.

Describing their grouping as Citizens for Constitution Freedom, Bundy said the aim was to “restore and defend the constitution that each person in this country can be protected by it and prosperity can continue”.

He has said that their protest could take “several months at the shortest to accomplish.”

“I will say this refuge from its very inception has been a tool of tyranny,” said Bundy.

The FBI has kept its distance and the presence of law enforcement officials has been light, as the government has refused to escalate the stand-off by seeking to end it by arresting militia members.

The last thing the government wants is another Waco when the federal agents stormed David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Texas in April 1993 after a 51-day siege and fire killed about 80 people.

At a time when so many conservatives feel disenfranchised with the Washington government, some turn to Donald Trump or Ted Cruz.

Others, like the men in Oregon, take matters into their own hands.