Greg Abbott spoke with Sean Hannity on The Sean Hannity Show about the federal government’s potential land grab near the Red River in Texas.
*Transcript may not be exact.
SEAN HANNITY: Attorney General soon to be governor of the great state of Texas, Greg Abbott is with us. How are you?
ATTORNEY GENERAL GREG ABBOTT: Sean, I am doing great we are still looking forward to when you relocate to the great state of Texas.
HANNITY: Alright, well…I talked to Governor Perry who is up in new york, you know he is trying to swipe every business out of New York and I think he is pretty successful so I anticipate when you are governor you are going to be doing the same thing
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well and the deal though is we are not swiping. We are not swiping it we are enticing businesses to Texas because of competition because we have low taxes, because we have reasonable regulations. We have right to work laws and so Texas is the place, if you believe in independence. If you believe that you have a country to what Barack Obama said that you can build your own business then Texas is the right place for you. Plus, Sean, related to what we are talking about in Texas you have government officials who are going to push back against an overreaching federal government.
HANNITY: Well, I and this gets to the heart of it and I am really so angry about these comments by Clive and Bundy because…and I have been on eminent domain issues for years and we are going to show a lot of the cases I was involved in tonight on tv. And we played some of the audio on this program today and it angers me because now the liberal media is going to focus on his ignorance, which by the way, I totally concur with. And it obscures the larger picture here which is that it was such a volatile situation in my mind at this ranch that they surrounded with 200 agents and then that attracted, you know, some of these nut cases out there and I thought somebody was going to die and it was getting so scary out there and I think now people are going to say, “see! All of these republicans were supporting a racist!” No, we find his comments repugnant. But, I found the reaction of the government overreaching, by a long shot. What did you think?
GENERAL ABBOTT: (gasps) Well there are, there are three fundamental principles here: One is that the United States of America was built upon certain fundamental ideas – one is the rule of law and two is private property rights. Second, we are seeing both of those fundamental principles eroded, especially under the Obama administration. Uh, as a quick example and that is look what has happened under Obamacare where the President came out and said, “ok, now the law is passed. This is the law of the land after the Supreme Court upheld it and then after the Supreme Court upheld it, he, the President, continued to move and adjust and alter and change, supposedly, the law of the land. Now we are seeing the very same thing happen with regard to private property rights. Here in the state of Texas, we have had this Red River as the dividing line between Oklahoma and Texas. The land on either side of the Red River belonged to either Oklahomans or to Texans. Now, we have, uh, the federal bureau of land management come in and sayin’ they have a right to maybe as much as 90,000 acres of this property that has belonged to private property owners in the state of Texas. So this is a a complete abdication of the rule of law and private property rights and this is contrary to the fundamental principles upon which this country was based.
HANNITY: What is their legal claim here? What is there, why have they just come out of nowhere and said this is ours and we are going to take or at least that’s what they are planning to do, apparently.
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well uh, first what they are saying is more under the cover of darkness and that they are saying that they are taking it because they are saying it was theirs all along. And…we don’t have a clue as to why they are saying they have a right to this, which is why I sent that letter to the Head of the Bureau of Land Management to find out exactly what their claims are. I’m trying to discover information, uh, that will help me determine whether or not I should bring a lawsuit against them, uh, to quiet title about this land. Sean, it is completely uncertain as to why they claim they have an interest here. Let me give you one quick backdrop and that is it was the uh the Bureau of Land Management themselves in the mid-1990’s that came out and said well the the titles of this land is uncertain and what they needed was to have Congress pass an act that clarified this. After that, Texas and Oklahoma entered into a compact. We took that compact to the United States Congress. The Congress ratified that compact and that settled it once and for all. Only now for the Bureau of Land Management to come out and say, “well they are ascerting an interest to almost as much as 90,000 acres of land belongs to private property owners in the great state of Texas.
HANNITY: Its unbelievable to me. Let let me ask you this – and tell me if I am wrong because you’re an attorney general. You’ve, I’m sure you have had to deal with cases where there were ranchers. By the way, I told Governor Perry I am gonna, I want to get a little itty bitty baby ranch, you know, for me when I go down to Texas, so I’m I’m planning on keeping a little condo in Florida and I’m gonna go back and forth. That’s my decision.
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well to start a ranch in Texas is 10,000 acres.
HANNITY: no no no no no that’s way too much land for me. I think, do you only have like a miniature version? You know where I could have you know, some animals, I love animals. I’d like to have, maybe a bike path. Maybe I’ll swing a couple of golf balls in the backyard and be able to find the balls somewhere
GENERAL ABBOTT: You would have so much fun.
HANNITY: I would really like to have horses stuff like that but not a huge massive big property. Like maybe a thousand acres. Is that a baby ranch?
GENERAL ABBOTT: A thousand acres would be perfect. When people connect with the land they realize what’s drawn people to this land from across the globe for centuries. There is something special about being connected to the land and I got to tell you, as a father raising a daughter, some of the best experiences we’ve had together is when I take my daughter out onto the land and when I took her hunting for the first time out in west Texas as we walked across land, you realize the same connection our forefathers had centuries ago when they walked this land and what our successors will have centuries from now. There is something unique about being connected to the land and that’s why we both cherish it so much in Texas but also why we fight so vigorously to protect it, especially from a Federal government that’s trying to take it away from us.
HANNITY: SO my question for you as Attorney General, I assume over the years, you have run into a case where some guys didn’t pay their grazing fees, right? Never? I mean that surprises me.
GENERAL ABBOTT: Not me.
HANNITY: Have you heard of cases in Texas? I got to assume somebody didn’t pay their grazing fees.
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well, I would have to assume something like that may have been done. It is nothing that has crossed my desk.
HANNITY: Wow. We keep getting reports, there is this woman out in Nevada who says there has never been a bill seen by anybody, but the reports were always in that case, that it was a million dollars. I can’t imagine that somebody’s cows or cattle eating grass can run up a million dollars, that sounds to me like a lot of fees and penalties and interests and stuff like that, right?
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well that is one thing that you do often see and that is that the bill or the charge or whatever the fee could be, let’s say a couple of thousand dollars, ten thousand dollars they add attorney’s fees and interests, etc, etc, Sometimes the amount the Federal government is asking for is two, three, four, ten times as much as what the underlying fee or assessment was.
HANNITY: I mean, this just seems pretty expensive. This si government grass where i kept bringing up the term proportionality and people go nuts, stop saying that. Let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on in Texas. I got into this yesterday with Governor Perry, Who’s up here in New York, he may be back now, I’m not sure, He spends a lot of time in New York, and he’s not here in vacation. He’s up here talking to business owners and apparently he’s been somewhat successful, in convincing them that between the bureaucracy and the regulations and the tax rates and the lifestyle that Texas is a much better place to run your business. How many businesses have you seen move from other states to your state?
GENERAL ABBOTT: The answer is countless, a lot, I tell a story about what I call the fastest growing demographic group in the state of Texas. People who are flooding across the border on seemingly a daily basis, and we call them Califorinans and there’s this story about Jay Adere who’s the CEO of a multi-million dollar international business names Co-Part. And he left California to come to Texas because of the high taxes in California, the low taxes here, because of the differences in the regulatory regime and because Texas is a right-to-work state. But he said the most powerful thing about coming to the state of the Texas is what he has experienced after being here. He said Texans have something that Californians don’t have and that is freedom. And it’s that freedom and free enterprise that accounts countless businesses from across the entire nation here. But Sean here’s the most important thing. And I think you and I may have the same belief on this and that is, it’s a huge challenge to change the nation from the top down, from Washington D.C. down and so what Rick Perry has spearheaded and we’ve now seen taken route across the county, from the bottom up, by forcing other states to compete with Texas for jobs. You’re forcing other states to change their laws, looks at all the great lake states except for Illinois. Look at Michigan, look at Wisconsin, look at Ohio. They’ve now changed their laws to be right to work laws, to now have better labor standards and lower costs, look at what Bobby Jindal has done in Louisiana look at what Rick Scott has done in Florida look at what other states are doing trying to decrease their taxes, and Sean even here in the state of Texas, we are seeing commercials done by the state of New York, they have this project, some special project where they’re going to have taxes low for companies that start up, it’s called start up New York. And so even New York is having to compete with Texas, through old fashioned competition, we are going to change the United States of America to implement less government, low taxes, smart regulation and get the boot off the back of the people and let the people elevate this nation like we did from the very beginning. You know I guess deep in my heart I’m just a Texan because I look at what’s going on here in New York. You know, Governor Perry said in the last census you guys got what, over 5 million new Texans or something astronomical number.
GENERAL ABBOTT: It is huge, Sean. We’re adding about 1,000 new Texans every single day. Think about that. We’re adding basically a city of 250,000 to 300,000 people a year to the state of Texas. People cannot flee places like California and New York fast enough and they know they’re searching for freedom.
HANNITY: I just want to remind them: they can’t bring their liberal policies with them. Keep your liberal views at home. If you want to be in a liberal state, stay exactly where you are.
GENERAL ABBOTT: Right. And you know, you see things like 2nd Amendment rights threatened by both your Mayor and your Governor in New York.
HANNITY: Oh, you have no idea. You have no idea.
GENERAL ABBOTT: People flee New York thinking if they want to hold on to their Constitutional guarantees, the place to go is the great state of Texas.
HANNITY: Great state. That’s what’s happening. What about a lot of people are criticizing you because you said ‘come and take it,’ which by the way, I really liked. That gave you higher marks in my books. And you were speaking to the BLM. What happens if they try and confiscate these Texans’ land? What do you do?
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well first people need to understand the historical context. I know all Texans know this. People from outside of Texas may not understand the historical context, and that is back in the early stages, when Texas was about to engage—we were the independent nation of Texas and we were about to engage in a war with Mexico, the Mexican army tried to come and take a cannon in Gonzalez, Texas. And Texans raised a flag with a picture of a cannon on there and said come and take it, taunting the Mexicans to come and grab what we believed was our rightful property. So ever since that time, when Texans believe that someone is trying to take our property without authority, we say come and take it, meaning that we will fight in defend our property rights. And so this is a quintessential, traditional Texas saying that all Texans understand. But we are prepared, if they do try to come and take our private property rights, we are prepared to go into the courtroom and fight just like in the other 30 lawsuits that I have filed against the Obama administration. I will make this my 31st lawsuit against the Obama administration if they come here and try to take land that rightfully belongs to Texas.
HANNITY: Well my goal is, Mr. Attorney General, is to be down there before the end of your first term as a proud Texan and Floridian, because I’m going to have a place in both states. That’s my decision.
GENERAL ABBOTT: Well here’s my promise to you, and that is when you step foot as a member of being a fellow Texan, as the next Governor of Texas I will make you an honorary Admiral of the Texas Navy.
HANNITY: I’d love that, that’d be awesome. Thank you very much. We really appreciate it and I look forward to you winning your election and I have no doubt you will. Thank you Attorney General, I appreciate you being with us.
GENERAL ABBOTT: Thank you Sean.