Wampum

Amazing. In the 1870's a jealous House killed the Senate's Treaty powers, and in 2008 another institutionally indifferent soon to be ex-Senator values the Senate's oversight over existing Treaties at about Zippo.

To say that siding with Indians over the CBC is the "politically expedient road" is laughable on its face. But that's not really here or there.

I think there are valid concerns about the 1866 Treaty (and all treaties) and the Senate's job to oversee it; I join you in bemoaning the evisceration of the legislative body's oversight role. I would love to see the Senate step in and move to uphold ALL Indian treaties. Why you are advocating Congress intervene in THIS case confuses me, however.

I reject (and repudiate!) CNO's actions regarding the Freedmen; what a horrible and needless thing to do. But Congress stepping in to terminate the Cherokee Nation as an answer is an immediate threat to all tribes. The fact that anyone in Congress would be willing to exercise the body's plenary power in such a manner is indicative or the low regard for tribal governments and their existence.

This has gone far beyond the issue at hand at Cherokee. We can't have Congress reacting with a guillotine every time an Indian nation makes it mad. "They abrogated their Treaty" may be a legitimate concern, but coming from Congress--or anyone else in the government--is too precious for words.

The answer here is not to hold the Housing bill and the Indian Health Care bill hostage as an effort to punish Cherokee. I don't see any reason not to let this work its way through the courts to determine if Cherokee has the authority to dis-enroll the Freedmen. I hope the verdict is that it doesn't, but there should be no intervention-by-fiat from Congress. We've already been through that era, and I'm not interested in going back into it.

First, the present issue is voter suppression.
Second, the authority of the United States to certify specific elections arises from a specific law that applies to a specific set of tribal governments which that law enabled to hold elections for the executives of those tribes.
Third, the representation that the United States has waived its authority to certify a subset of those specific elections for executives applies also to other elections which may modify the class of persons eligible to vote in those other elections as well as to elections for the executives of those tribes is made by a small group of persons acting in concert, of whom one or more persons directly concerned with this specific representation are now convicted for offenses against Congressional oversight.
Fourth, the Congress of the United States, which created the specific law that applies to a specific set of tribal governments, one of which is a party to litigation in the Federal Courts and other Courts, has not affirmed the acts of the Executive of the United States mentioned Third.

The Curtis Act of 1908 and the Principal Chiefs Act of 1970 simply do not apply to any but a very few Tribes, and there are Acts of Congress prior to the Curtis Act specific to some or all of those Tribes which also do not apply to any other Tribes.

Also, let's be clear here, NO ONE, not the CBC nor anyone else in Congress has proposed to TERMINATE the Cherokee Nation, as the Cherokee Nation caused to be done to the Delawares. Termination means the legal end of the existence of a tribe, the sort of thing that was done during the Termination Era of the 1950's. The WORST the CBC would do is withhold funds from CN, something ENTIRELY different, and the EXACT SAME THING that happened to the Seminole when they did the EXACT SAME THING to their Freedmen. Yes, tribal sovereignty is endangered here, but put the blame where it belongs: solely at the feet of Chad Smith and the blatantly racist anti-Freedmen faction with their fraudulent petition drive.

Local Crank: Here's Congresswoman Watson's termination bill. I agree that none of this would have happened if Cherokee hadn't acted the way it did, but Congress is going after a fly with a shotgun.

ebw: With all due respect, those may be the legal issues in question, but no one in Congress is talking about intervening with elections. The amendments to IHCIA and NAHASDA will cut off funding to the tribe, and Watson's bill will sever the Federal-Tribal relationship. In addition, the CBC is holding Indian legislation hostage while they get in a snit; we usually look to the Republican Steering Committee for these tricks. The issue we face here isn't which election oversight bill and authority applies to which tribe, but whether Congress will disrespect tribal sovereignty and intervene in a tribe's affairs when it feels like it.

Why doesn't Congress just pass a law saying the Freedmen are members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, if they're so concerned for them? The Freedmen don't benefit if there is no Cherokee.

But does Congress just feel like it? Isn't this equivalent to claiming that Congress is arbitrary and capricious and ... no cause arises out of the specific conduct of Principal Chief Chad Smith or the Assistant Secretary Carl Artman? There are a lot of disenfranchisements going on in Tribal polities, and only one has attracted Congressional attention in the form of a specific bill.

Compare also with Congressional action after Duro, when Congress exercised its plenary authority and quickly enacted what became known as the "Duro fix," amending the Indian Civil Rights Act to restore and affirm the "inherent power of Indian tribes...to exercise criminal jurisdiction over all Indians," expressly avoiding the language of a delegation of federal authority.

You've located the central issue in your analysis. I understand you, and disagree with you. Here is mine -- Chad, the CNO, the Freedmen, are all peripheral. Yes, this motivated Congresswoman Watson and some members of the CBC, and perhaps shared values motivates some other members, even those in the majority leadership, but that's not what is going to get a veto proof majority in the House and Senate and send to the Executive a bill that ends the last free ride of the Jack Abramoff merrygoround between this administration's BIA, its DOI and its DOJ.

The more fundamental issue is the relationship between the Federal Legislature and the Federal Executive to make Indian policy, to move the locus of control for all resource extraction bills from "the Senator from Indian Country", a Republican and corrupt whether John McCain or Ben Campbell, to more members of Congress. We now have members from the coasts, from the major urban centers, taking a policy interest in what was left to the local (non-Indian) elites.

I think we're watching the second act of the Downfall of Jack Abramoff, and Chad is the lull in the action while the majority in the more populous coasts conceptually prepare for the third and final act -- to terminate, not Tribal Governments, but the regimes co-dependent upon the States governments captured by the energy extraction corporations. Dick Cheney in tiny little three electoral vote Wyoming, along with Sansonetti, and Norton and Federici in nine electoral vote Colorado have more power over federal lands than the combined Congressional delegations from California, New York, Texas, and the rest of the big states. The Invisible Empire of the Western Interior is about to lose its privilege of exclusive control over western federal minerals, water, land and Indian policy, and as bad as that looks for Chad, selling energy on the New York mercantile exchange is a better deal for CERT Tribes than not being able to get past the local Republican contributing corporate gatekeeper.

I know this is hard. We ran, we lost. Diane Watson helped re-elect Chad and that too is an unfortunate part of the dynamic, but we have to come to grips with the facts -- Cherokees leave policy to a electoral aristocracy, as if nothing could ever go deeply wrong. It has.

"Here's Congresswoman Watson's termination bill"

I've read it, but it's still NOT a "termination bill." Ending the "government to government" relationship between a tribe and the Federal gov't is NOT the same thing as "termination," a very specific legal term wherein the tribe completely ceases to exist as a legal entity and all of its assets are seized and disposed of by the Federal gov't. If Watson's bill were enacted, CN will still have a gov't to gov't relationship with the State of Oklahoma, would still own its land, casinos, schools and hospitals, would still have law enforcement and taxing compacts with Oklahoma (well, assuming Chief Smith doesn't screw that up, too).