by John Aloysius Farrell
Denver Post Washington Bureau Chief
Denver Post
WASHINGTON – U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth is a good ol’ boy from Texas, a rodeo fan who wears cowboy boots and listens to country music.
A libertarian of the conservative sort, Lamberth was appointed to the bench by Ronald Reagan. The judge first won fame by tormenting the occupants of the Clinton White House with rulings that challenged presidential prerogatives.
During the dispute over the records of Hillary Clinton’s health care task force, the “Filegate” flap and other contretemps, Lamberth took a dim view of government prevarication. He compared administration lawyers to “con artists and hooligans.” The Clintonistas thought him a black-cloaked Brahman bull.
Which is why, in a city where principle often serves as a mask for avarice or partisan ambition, Lamberth has surprised many by continuing to champion the rights of a group of Native American landowners who filed suit in his court in 1996 against the Department of the Interior.
The Indians claim that Interior has horribly bungled its duty to tally, collect and pay out grazing fees, oil royalties and other lease payments generated by their land. Under Lamberth’s lash (he has cited two Clinton Cabinet secretaries and the current secretary of the interior, Gale Norton, with contempt of court), federal bureaucrats have made a series of humiliating admissions about their ineptitude, bolstering the Indian case.
The U.S. government engaged in a “shocking pattern of deception,” Lamberth ruled.
“He has his own individual style. He is unpredictable,” U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, the Democrat from Boulder, says of the judge. “But all in all, he has done an important service here. He has raised the profile of this dilemma.”
Alarmed at the prospect of throwing more tens of millions of dollars after the hundreds of millions the government has already spent in the litigation – which could end in a multibillion-dollar award to the Indians – the Bush administration and its allies in Congress have stirred. Last week, as Lamberth heard final arguments in a crucial stage of the case, members of the House Appropriations Committee endorsed a measure that would let the administration impose a settlement on the Indians. Essentially, it would allow Norton’s department to guesstimate via statistical sampling how much it owes.
Tex Hall, president of the National Congress of American Indians, said Native Americans are open to a settlement but that the appropriators’ approach was “extraordinarily unfair.”
“It’s viewed by many as an end run around the normal process,” said Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona. “To adopt a policy which is overwhelmingly disapproved of by the people who are directly affected is not the way we generally do business around here.”
Hall asked his fellow Americans to consider how they would handle a dispute with a bank over the balance in their checking account. Most would demand a say in resolving the dispute – especially if the bank admitted that it had lost or destroyed its records and couldn’t say how much it owed them – and some sort of legal recourse if the bank’s offer to settle was inadequate. But the appropriators’ fix, he said, “would give the bank complete authority to end all disputes over account balances under a methodology of its own choosing.”
The Indians were fortunate in that the appropriators overplayed their hand, angering House Resources Committee chairman Richard Pombo, a Republican from California. At a hearing Wednesday, Pombo vowed to kill the proposal because its sponsors were intruding on his turf: legislating via a spending bill, without hearings or a vote in his committee. By week’s end, it was dead.
Udall, a member of Pombo’s committee, is working with McCain, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and other Western lawmakers on a bill to solve the problem, perhaps by establishing a commission to handle claims or by shifting administration of the funds to the Treasury Department.
Many in Congress “want to figure out a way to solve it now, rather than later,” Udall said.
If not, they know, Judge Lamberth will find a way.
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