editiorial
The Denver Post
Gale Norton, U.S. Interior Secretary, is a decent, hardworking person – who deserves to get taken to the woodshed for mishandling the Indian trust funds.
Norton didn’t create the problems – she’s held office for two years, while the trust funds are more than a century old – but it’s her job to fix the mess. She hasn’t. In fact, she’s been dishonest about her department’s failures.
For those mistakes, she and a top assistant got slapped Tuesday with contempt of court by the federal judge hearing the Indians’ case against the U.S. government.
In the 19th century, Uncle Sam took control of lucrative Indian assets including mineral royalties and grazing leases, promising to manage the assets in the Indians’ best interests – but failing miserably to give the Indians the money due them.
In 1996, the Boulder-based Native Americans Rights Fund and former Denver lawyer Dennis Gingold sued the feds on behalf of Indians nationwide who have trust accounts.
The case still hasn’t been settled, although the government has spent millions of dollars on new (and malfunctioning) computers – and, worse, on courtroom games.
In 1999, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is hearing the case in Washington, D.C., slapped a contempt order on Bruce Babbitt and Robert Rubin, then secretaries of Interior and Treasury. The move embarrassed both officials because it’s rare for courts to hold members of the cabinet personallyresponsible for underlings’ foul-ups.
The contempt citation against Norton, however, is more mortifying. Babbitt and Rubin faced only one contempt count, but Norton faced five, including a finding that she deceived the judge about how far her department has gotten in resolving the trust-fund fiasco. According to Lamberth, Norton committed a “fraud on the court” – one of the sharpest reprimands a judge can give a lawyer.
This newspaper disagrees with Norton on certain environmental policies, but we also believe she’s a dedicated public servant. So it’s with sadness that we, too, criticize her harshly for breaking promises to the Indians, Congress, the court and taxpayers.
Norton is a lawyer, not a technology whiz, but she needs to get tough with her underlings and demand better technical advice. The trust’s computers are so bug-infested that she ought to call the computer-geek version of Orkin.
However, it’s puzzling that Lamberth hasn’t held Attorney General John Ashcroft in contempt, too. Most of the roadblocks to settling the lawsuit were erected by the Justice Department, not Interior, so Lamberth should call to account the government lawyers who have misled the court.
Putting Ashcroft, who otherwise is focusing on terrorism, on the hook may force his subordinates to resolve the case instead of playing courtroom games.
Finally, the leading Indian in American politics is Colorado’s U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell. As a Republican, Campbell should have access to the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Campbell has, in fact, held committee hearings on the trust-fund issue. But maybe it’s time for Campbell to hop on his Harley, ride up to the White House doors and have a chat with the guy in the Oval Office about why settling the Indian trust fund case is the only fair and just thing to do.
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