Government overreach has always (and will always) be a problem, but the Biden administration seemed more than willing to take it to the next level. Overregulation was piled on overreach was piled on overzealous enforcement, and there can be no better example of this than the case of Charles and Heather Maude. The Maudes are South Dakota ranchers who had a dispute over land that had been leased by the Maudes for grazing, and instead of sitting down and talking with the Maudes, the Biden Department of Agriculture filed criminal charges. We originally brought you the story last September.
That ordeal for the Maudes is over. On Wednesday, the Trump administration’s Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, announced that all charges against the Maudes have been dropped.
The Secretary announced:
This un-American sentiment, this claim to a right to rule without recourse, is also precisely the prerogative that some bureaucrats under the Biden regime decided to assert, and their targets were an innocent and unimpeachable American farm and ranch family, the Maudes of South Dakota, who join us here today.
This family, targeted solely over what should have been a civil dispute over grazing rights over 25 acres of government land, was prosecuted, credibly threatened with jail sentences, so extreme that they were told to find alternatives to raise their young children. Charles and Maude live on a 5th-generation family farm in Pennington County, South Dakota, close to Mount Rushmore. There, they farm 400 acres. They raise about 250 head of cattle, and about 40 sows.