Oregon Live reports:

Occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for three weeks have made sweeping demands that local and federal authorities say are both brazen and unrealistic.

They want immediate freedom for imprisoned local ranchers. They want federal deeds voided and private owners to take over the property. They want the county to control the refuge. They want federal grazing permits vacated, leaving ranchers free to graze as they choose. And they say they won’t go until they get their way.

They mean they won’t go voluntarily. They can be made to go, and they should be. They’ve seized a wildlife refuge that belongs to all of us, and it’s not theirs to seize. They need to be thrown out and arrested and charged. They should not get bail.

Interviews with lawyers, ranchers, federal authorities and others make clear: Little of what they want is likely to happen for reasons that include legal principle, basic property rights, economic forces and cost. Federal authorities also say the occupiers are making demands that fly in the face of the U.S. Constitution.

Also? What they’re doing is extortion. Extortion is a crime.

In a 1976 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court confronted the point Bundy is trying to assert. New Mexico state officials tried to keep wild burros that they had seized from federal land. The officials claimed what the Oregon occupiers claim – that the Constitution strictly limits what property the federal government can own or control.

State officials argued in Kleppe vs. New Mexico that Congress had no power over public lands without state consent. “This argument is without merit,” the Supreme Court ruled.

State officials confused a constitutional provision focused more narrowly on how the federal government oversees land it acquires from a state with the unlimited powers granted to the federal government under the Constitution’s Property Clause, the court said.

They don’t get to overturn a Supreme Court ruling by force.

The occupiers advocate voiding grazing permits issued by the U.S. government as well.

Bundy is the son of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, who has renounced his federal grazing rights but continued running cattle on public land in a still-unsettled dispute with the federal land bureau. The dispute led to an armed standoff with federal authorities in 2014 – a precursor to the occupation underway in southeastern Oregon.

Voiding grazing rights, though, would be a vexing development in a region where many ranchers count on using public lands to feed livestock.

Occupiers say ranchers would revert to “historic” use of that land to continue grazing. What they seemed to have overlooked is that their plan calls for private ownership of the same high desert expanses that the federal government now rents at subsidized cost to the ranchers. They haven’t answered how ranchers would graze on what becomes private land.

By paying a much higher price! Freedom!!