Indian Affairs: Interior Department deserves court rebuke
Dallas Morning News
September 23, 2002
The Interior Department stands accused of horribly mismanaging something called the Indian Trust Fund. The fund was created in the late 19th century as a place for the U.S. government to deposit proceeds from the leasing of seized Indian land with its deposits of oil, gas and minerals. For decades, the Interior Department has been accused of misplacing or failing to collect tens of billions of dollars in royalties due 300,000 American Indians. It was sued in 1996, and in the proceedings U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth held in contempt Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. The charge: failing to make a good-faith effort to correct problems with the fund and assess how much money was involved.
That accusation is mild compared with the ones that Judge Lamberth last week aimed at current Interior Secretary Gale Norton. The judge said Secretary Norton “committed a fraud on the court” by lying about her department’s efforts to repair the accounting system and thus undermined the public’s trust.
Lawyers for Ms. Norton insist the issue is too complicated to be solved overnight, and they accuse Judge Lamberth of violating the separation of powers by telling the executive branch how to perform its duties.
The lawyers have it backward. If anything, Judge Lamberth’s criticism substantiates the separation-of-powers doctrine by doing what the courts are expected to do: provide checks and balances to dealings in the executive and legislative branches. If the executive branch is accused of exceeding its authority, or shirking its responsibility, who but the folks in the judicial branch can sit in judgment? As to the merits of this case, there is no doubt that the government is right about the issue being complicated and not easy to solve. It must be an accounting nightmare figuring out who owes how much to whom.
That is no excuse, however, for ignoring complaints and continuing a system that seems to have offered the country’s first and oldest constituency little more than another set of broken promises.
Even with his criticism, Judge Lamberth gave Secretary Norton one more chance to make amends by coming up with a plan of action by early next year. Ms. Norton should be grateful for the reprieve and dedicate her best efforts to finding a way out of this mess.
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