St. Paul Pioneer Press: Editorial from Minnesota
After years of judicial spankings at the hands of U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, the federal government is now asking that the judge be removed from the case involving Interior Department mismanagement of billions of dollars in American Indian trust accounts.
Rather than target the judge in a case that has brought embarrassment and contempt citations to the government, federal officials should close the book on this sorry story once and for all. Fix the trust system and pay account holders whose money has disappeared. The fix won't be easy, nor inexpensive. But the mess is of the government's own making, through a century of malfeasance and incompetence.
The irony in the whole situation is the very nature of the government's trustee role: The federal government collects money for oil, timber and mineral leases, among other things, and holds it for Indian tribes and individuals, presumably because the tribes and individual account holders were incapable of managing their own money.
That the government cannot say how much money it has collected over the years, how much it has disbursed and how much should be in individual accounts would be funny if it weren't so sad.
The Indian plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the government, led by banker Elouise Cobell, have offered a detailed plan for settling the issue once and for all and have set a price tag: $27.5 billion.
On the surface, that seems a steep price. But looking at it in context paints another picture. The settlement figure is roughly equal to the highway project earmarks granted to individual members of Congress in the pork-laden $286 billion federal transportation bill that passed last month.
That seems a small price to pay to end a century of incompetence and injustice aimed at the poorest Americans.
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