As the Tea Partiers run wild in Montana, the folks with common sense start to turn away
Douglas Kennedy eagerly filed this report from the wilds of Montana this morning for Fox News, describing the exploits of a Montana Tea Party Republican legislator named Greg Hinkle, from Thompson Falls -- just coincidentally the home of the Militia of Montana ...
Hinkle is a Republican state senator from Thomson Falls, and he recently proposed a law, likely the first of its kind, asking federal law enforcement to first seek approval of county sheriffs before any federal intervention in the state of Montana. He calls it “The Sheriffs First Bill.”
“I believe that before any federal agency does any action within a county,” he explained, “they should cooperate with the sheriff, coordinate with the sheriff and go to him and say this is what we need to do in this county.”
For instance, Hinkle would want the FBI to first notify a Montana sheriff before executing a search warrant or making an arrest in the state of Montana.
At one point he allowed for arrest of any federal agent who didn’t comply, but has since taken out that language. He also reluctantly added a line that allows for federal agents to notify sheriffs “after the fact,” in order to get the bill through the Montana House of Representatives.
Nonetheless, legal observers still call Hinkle’s bill “a clear violation of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”
“The federal government does not have to ask or even inform local law enforcement about what they are doing,” said James Cohen, a constitutional law professor at Fordham Law School in New York. “Sometimes they do because it’s convenient, but they do not have to.”
Hinkle points out that the bill has already passed the Montana State Senate (with the original language) and is expected to pass the House in the next couple of weeks.
He also says there’s a lot of support in Montana, a state which he says well remembers the deadly federal raids at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992 and Waco, Texas, in 1993.
Funny that a parachuting reporter would forget this, but in reality, Montanans remember even better the longest armed standoff with federal agents in history: the 81-day FBI standoff in Jordan with the Montana Freemen. (Yes, yours truly was there.) As Jim Lopach, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Montana, put it in a retrospective piece:
Lopach said the real legacy of the standoff could be that it gave people a reason to consider how far and how deep devotion to political individualism should go.
"It might be a moderating thing," he said. "It might be that they saw the dangers of extremism."
In reality, Hinkle's bill is one we've known about for awhile. It was one of a package of bills that Montana Patriot-movement leader Gary Marbut announced last September in Hamilton at a gathering I covered. (You can watch the video of Marbut describing it here.)
Tonight Marbut wants to talk about a new piece of sovereignty legislation he plans to promote in the state legislature, something he calls Sheriffs First. The bill would make it a crime in Montana for a federal officer to arrest, search or seize without advance written permission from the county sheriff, Marbut explains, to enthusiastic applause.
