Free Republic

As the Senate launches its second impeachment trial of Donald Trump next week, its members must confront the deep unfairness of the proceedings. The Senate rashly claimed jurisdiction over a former president, fumbled on the selection of a presiding judge, and ignored the constitutional — not political — standards that should prevail. Further, it has given Trump’s depleted legal team little time or means to present a full defense — the only guarantee that the American people will accept the verdict as fair. Trump’s lawyers will have to accept these unfair conditions, though might conceivably be able to appeal directly...

In South Dakota, the president of the Oglala Sioux Tribe has ordered President Trump to cancel a planned visit to Mount Rushmore on July 3 for his Independence Day celebration. Julian Bear Runner told The Guardian, “The lands on which that mountain is carved and the lands he’s about to visit belong to the Great Sioux nation under a treaty signed in 1851 and the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and I have to tell him he doesn’t have permission from its original sovereign owners to enter the territory at this time.”

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Native American man who was convicted of hunting off-season in Bighorn National Forest. Neil Gorsuch joined the four liberal justices in Herrera v. Wyoming, holding that an 1868 treaty between the U.S. and the Native American Crow Tribe granted the tribe the right to hunt in "unoccupied lands," and that the treaty did not expire when Wyoming became a state in 1890. Crow Tribe member Clayvin Herrera was charged with off-season hunting in 2014, but he argued that the 151-year-old treaty protected his ability to hunt at that time....

The Fourteenth Amendment, which was adopted in 1868, declares that no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” A debate that has been raging in courtrooms for years is whether the “life” part includes unborn persons. Harvard Law student Joshua Craddock did some constitutional soul searching to answer that question in a new report for the Harvard Law Journal, concluding that unborn babies do fall under the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections. One might look to dictionaries of legal and common usage, the context...

Even while the Civil War raged, slaves in Cuba could be heard singing, “Avanza, Lincoln, avanza! Tu eres nuestra esperanza!” (Onward, Lincoln, Onward! You are our hope!) – as if they knew, even before the soldiers fighting the war far to the North and long before most politicians understood, that the war in America would change their lives, and the world. The secession crisis of 1860-1861 threatened to be a major setback to the world antislavery movement, and it imperiled the whole experiment in democracy. If slavery was allowed to exist, and if the world’s leading democracy could fall apart...

The vile and repugnant Jason Whitlock just keeps the hits on coming. His ignorant screed denigrating our civil rights following an incident where a Kansas City Chiefs NFL player slayed his wife and then went to the Chief’s training area to thank his coach before doing society a favor and offing himself was offensive enough to America’s one hundred plus million gun owners. Jason’s Whitlock’s inner racist bigotry was out for all to see in subsequent remarks he made, equating the National Rifle Association and America’s gun owners with the Ku Klux Klan. Here is what the knuckle-dragging racist bigot...

Chief Oliver Red Cloud, Lakota, issued a statement to President Obama requesting a meeting more than two weeks ago and is yet to receive a response. Chief Red Cloud, 90, told Obama the Black Hills are not — and have never been — for sale September 13, 2009The Honorable Barack H. ObamaPresident of the United States of AmericaThe White House1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NWWashington, DC 20500Dear Mr. President:I am the Itancan (chief) of the Oglala Lakota Band of the Great Sioux Nation and Chairman of the Black Hills Sioux Nation Treaty Council, the traditional governing body of the eight bands of...

THE BATTLE OF THE WASHITA (November 27, 1868, Indian territory - modern-day Oklahoma) Gregory F. Michno, ENCYCLOPEDIA of Indian Wars 1850-1890, pages 226-227 "On November 12, 1868 , 11 companies of the 7th Cavalry under Lt. Col. George A. Custer, 3 companies of the 3rd Infantry, 1 of the 5th Infantry, 1 of the 38th Infantry, and about 450 wagons set out from Fort Dodgefor Indian territory to seek out hostile Indians. Across a snow-covered landscape Custer followed Indian trails to a 50-lodge Cheyenne village on the banks of the Washita River. Early on the frigid morning of 27 November,...

Governor Darrell Flyingman of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma put things in realistic perspective when he arose to speak. He talked about the thousands of acres of land either ceded or stolen by hook and crook from the people of his nation over the years (in Oklahoma). He said, "I consider this to be a site of a massacre (Washita battlefield, OH) and not a battlefield as it is named and I will do everything within my power to see that the site is renamed as the Washita Massacre rather than Battlefield. Gov. Flyingman said that he felt...