Two Republican presidential candidates have spoken out against the Oregon standoff: Senators Cruz and Rubio.

Aleister blogged about the precarious Oregon situation yesterday:

Protesters have taken over a small federal building in Oregon and some of them are armed. One of them is Ammon Bundy, son of rancher Cliven Bundy who was in the news last year for clashing with federal authorities over land use. The reason for the protest seems to be two-fold. The situation which set off the protest was the prosecution of a pair of father and son ranchers named Hammond. The Hammonds are not part of the protest however and are expected to surrender themselves to authorities Monday for separate charges. The second aspect of the protest is a grievance over the federal government taking over land that used to be owned by ranchers.

In an interview on Iowa radio station KBUR Monday, Sen. Rubio acknowledged the federal government has too much control over land in the western half of the country, but urged protestors to seek a lawful remedy:

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio also addressed the issue Monday, telling an Iowa radio station “you cannot be lawless.” Rubio said during an interview with KBUR that he agrees “that there is too much federal control over land especially out in the western part of the United States.” “We should fix it, but no one should be doing it in a way that’s outside the law,” he added.

Rubio’s full remarks are here:

Later, Sen. Cruz too called for protestors to ‘stand down peaceably.’

.@tedcruz urges stand down in Oregon by those who have overtaken refuge headquarters pic.twitter.com/Q0z2I8TD8e — Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) January 4, 2016

NBC News reported:

“Every one of us has a constitutional right to protest, to speak our minds,” Cruz told reporters in Iowa. “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.”

Cruz’s remarks Monday differ from 2014 when the Bundy standoff was last in national headlines. Then, Cruz referred to the standoff as an, “unfortunate and tragic culmination of the path that President Obama has set the federal government on.”

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