Hail To The Chief (Read Mod Warning In OP)

“They [Trump’s contractors] put up this fence, in the process taking out a power line and blacking out about 10 houses for three or four hours, and sent us the bill - for £2,800, half what they said was the total £5,600 cost of the fence.

“I priced the materials. The fence would have cost £800. We have completely ignored the bill.”

He added: “The argument was that the boundaries of our property were in the wrong place, part of our land wasn’t our land, it was theirs, and the back wall of the garage was on their property etc.

“So their fence was going to be the new boundary – even though the fence they were replacing was a Government-built fence, put up by the Government, in the mid-1950s, to reflect what was in the title deeds when our old coastguard station first became an independent building.

“I know whose set of drawings I would trust.”

The year after erecting the fence, said Mr Milne, “They built an earth bank around us, 6m (20ft) high, 70m (230ft) in length, on the north and west side, within a metre of the boundary of our property.”

Mr Milne said the sea views he and his wife had enjoyed from their living room were blocked, as they were when the earth bank was replaced by a load of 20ft-25ft high mature sitka spruce conifer trees.

Although, Milne added, “You don’t plant sitka spruces in a salt atmosphere right next to the sea. After about a year and a half the first trees died and had to be replaced by a second lot – which are now definitely failing too. We can see the sea through the gaps in the trees.”

When John and Susie Munro first moved into their house 34 years ago, their two sons could stroll to the beach or play in the garden against a backdrop of uninterrupted views over fields and dunes to Aberdeen.

Now, they told The Independent, the view is obstructed by a 15ft high earth wall, and the stroll to the beach is blocked by a custom-made gate erected just outside their garden.

“It used to be secluded, a great place to bring up kids,” said Mr Munro, 70, a retired trawlerman and oil rig worker. “You could see for nine miles. Now you can only see for about 30 yards, and then there’s the bund [earth wall].

“He [Trump] will trample over anybody to get what he wants.”

One of Donald Trump’s prospective picks for the Supreme Court believes gay people should be prosecuted for having sex because they are not protected by the constitution.

While serving as Alabama’s Attorney General in 2003, William H Pryor Jr wrote a legal brief in defence of a Texan law – later struck down by the Supreme Court – which criminalised consensual gay sex.

He compared it to “polygamy, incest, paedophilia, prostitution, and adultery” and said the Alabama court had “never recognised a fundamental right to engage in sexual activity outside of monogamous heterosexual marriage, let alone to engage in homosexual sodomy”.

“Such a right would be antithetical to the ‘traditional relation of the family’ that is as old and as fundamental as our entire civilisation”, he added.

But he also said that anal sex between heterosexual partners was acceptable because it was not as bad as homosexual sex.

He explained: “Texas is hardly alone in concluding that homosexual sodomy may have severe physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual consequences, which do not necessarily attend heterosexual sodomy, and from which Texas’s citizens need to be protected”.

He claimed that people did not have the right to engage in whatever consensual sex they liked behind closed doors because “homosexual sodomy has not historically been recognised in this country as a right; to the contrary, it has historically been recognised as a wrong. It is not a fundamental right”.

In the midst of highly publicized steps to dismantle insurance coverage for 32 million people and defund women’s healthcare facilities, Republican lawmakers have quietly laid the foundation to give away Americans’ birthright: 640m acres of national land. In a single line of changes to the rules for the House of Representatives, Republicans have overwritten the value of federal lands, easing the path to disposing of federal property even if doing so loses money for the government and provides no demonstrable compensation to American citizens.

At stake are areas managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), National Forests and Federal Wildlife Refuges, which contribute to an estimated $646bn in economic stimulus from recreation on federal lands and 6.1m jobs. Transferring these lands to the states, critics fear, could decimate those numbers by eliminating mixed-use requirements, limiting public access and turning over large portions for energy or property development.

According to the Outdoor Alliance, US public land is the government’s second largest source of income after taxes. In addition to economic stimulus in outdoor activities, federal land also creates revenue through oil and gas production, logging and other industrial uses. According to the BLM, in 2016, it made $2bn in royalty revenue from federal leases.

Despite the Republican message that Washington has overstepped in designating national parks and monuments, a 2016 study found that 95% of the American public believes that National Parks are worth protecting and 80% said they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to do so.

“Western Republicans that are perpetuating the idea are very well funded by the oil and gas industry during their campaign,” Rowsome said. “It’s special interests wielding power for an agenda that will advance their goal. Nearly 90% of BLM lands are already open, but they can’t stop trying to get more.”

A 2016 Colorado College survey of seven western states found that 60% of voters rejected both the sale of public lands to states and giving states control without sale.

In 2012, Arizona voters struck down a proposal two pieces of legislation that would have turned over federal land to the state, including one that claimed the Grand Canyon as state land.

Grayson wrote: »