Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz on Monday called for a group of armed protesters who occupied a federal building in Oregon over the weekend to "stand down peaceably."
"Every one of us has a constitutional right to protest, to speak our minds," Cruz told reporters in Iowa, according to The Hill. "But we don’t have a constitutional right to use force and violence and to threaten force and violence against others. So it is our hope that the protesters there will stand down peaceably, that there will not be a violent confrontation."
Republican presidential rival Marco Rubio also called for a peaceful solution but sympathized with the militia's stance on federal control over land.
"And I agree that there is too much federal control over land especially out in the western part of the United States," Rubio said Monday morning on Iowa radio station KBUR, according to Time. "There are states for example like Nevada that are dominated by the federal government in terms of land holding and we should fix it, but no one should be doing it in a way that’s outside the law. We are a nation [sic] laws, we should follow those laws and they should be respected."
Ammon and Ryan Bundy are leaders of the armed protesters who have occupied a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, calling themselves Citizens for Constitutional Freedom, according to NBC News. Their father, Cliven Bundy, became known in 2014 when he staged an armed standoff with the federal Bureau of Land Management. The group in Oregon says it is protesting the punishment of Dwight Hammond Jr. and Steven Hammond, a father and son who are due to return to jail Monday to serve out a five-year prison sentence for arson on nearby federal land.
Other 2016 candidates have largely been silent about the standoff. However, John Weaver, a senior aide for Democratic candidate John Kasich, said in a tweet: "I know a good federal compound for Bundy and his gang: a U.S. penitentiary."
I know a good federal compound for Bundy and his gang: a U.S. penitentiary.
— John Weaver (@JWGOP) January 3, 2016
