Posted on 08/15/2005 2:32:13 PM PDT by SmithL
WASHINGTON - The Justice Department took the unusual step Monday of asking that a new judge be assigned to a 9-year-old lawsuit by American Indians seeking a century's worth of unpaid oil and gas royalties.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth has been highly critical of the Interior Department for failing to identify how much money Indian tribes are owed. Last year the judge held Interior Secretary Gale Norton in contempt of court.
Lamberth's "legal errors and unconventional case management" are impeding an accounting of the royalties, the Justice Department said in a 20-page filing asking a federal appeals court to order a change in judges.
The Justice Department said that a July 12, 2005, ruling by Lamberth "is unlike any other judicial opinion that we have ever seen."
The department criticized Lamberth for making a "gratuitous reference" to murder, dispossession, forced marches and other incidents of cultural genocide against the Indians.
Lamberth's ruling, the Justice Department complained, described the Interior Department to be a "dinosaur - the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago, the last pathetic outpost of the indifference and anglocentrism we thought we had left behind."
In 1994, Congress found problems with the Interior Department's administration of 260,000 Indian trust accounts containing $400 million.
The Indians allege the department mismanaged oil, gas, grazing, timber and other royalties from their lands dating to 1887. Elouise Cobell of the Blackfeet Indian tribe and others sued in 1996 to force the government to account for billions of dollars belonging to about 500,000 Indians.
The Indians say they are willing to settle for $27.5 billion.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has criticized the government for having "never really even made any serious attempt at keeping track of the revenues" it owed the Indians. McCain says, however, that the $27.5 billion figure is "just way out of sight."
Judge Lamberth is one of the good guys.
"Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has criticized the government for having "never really even made any serious attempt at keeping track of the revenues" it owed the Indians. McCain says, however, that the $27.5 billion figure is "just way out of sight."
Well - that is some of the few things that McCain has uttered that was halfway correct.
The democrat regimes have totally suppressed and hidden most of the records of what belongs to the indian tribes - and this was mostly done under "I feel your ..."Clinton cabal and the disgraced ex-senator Daschel (sp?) who did finally give the tribes some money but only if they participated in DNC voter fraud scams.
The U.S. govt owes these tribes at the least what they are asking for ... IMHO.
The Department of the Interior connived with Jimmah Cahtah to destroy 90 percent of America's small coal mines in the 1970s. The agency is good at something.
...wasn't it Harold Icky (a SHrILLARY Lackey/Bootlicker) carrying the ball on this?
He may be, but not in this case. He has lost all objectivity, has ignored efforts to settle this case, given the Indians false hope of a mega-billion dollar lotto landslide, violated the law by permitting illegal computer tampering, shut down the DOI computers on several occasions resulting in a stoppage of funds for the very allottees on whose behalf the whole lawsuit was implemented, and continually sided with the litigants no matter how outrageous their claims were.
He granted Judicial watch 800 thousand dollars of our tax money for their failed persuit of the last administration. Of course we all know that a large number of Freeper Dollars paid that legal bill once and now the taxpayers get to pay it again.
The DOJ may very well get a new judge. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals is fed up with Judge Lamberth. I happened, accidently, to attend the argument in the DC Circuit of the appeal of his contempt citation of Secretary Norton (I was there for another case). I must say that in 30 plus years of practicing law, I have never heard any court so willingly embrace criticism of a trial judge. Say what you want about the merits of the controversy, but Judge Lamberth clearly has crossed the line from judge to advocate. It is high time to remove him from this case.
Those of us who go to the courts on a regular basis know TOO MANY judges who have mentatally jumped the shark.
The inability of the government to account for money it holds in trust is all the proof one needs of the necessity to remove these funds from federal hands and place them in trusteeship under the direct control of the tribes.
The Indian claims are probably worth in the billions.
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