More hurty brain

"Let me e'splain. No. That will take too long, le' me sum up."

There has been a long lawsuit, where a lot of Indians have ben trying to find out what happened to billions of dollars of leasing rights they were supposed to have been paid (IIRC the number of billions is in the neighborhood of 200, not exactly chump change). Forget for the momement that oil companies made record profits last year (to the tune of a couple of dozen of those aforementioned billions, for one company, which name escapes me at the moment), because they paid the Feds for the rights to the oil they mined.

The Feds seem to have mislaid those fees, as well as a lot of other money.

So, the tribes sued. The cause is mismanagement of thngs since 1887, when the Gov't decided the Indians couldn't be trusted to manage their own finances and so set up, "individual accounts," and then assigned them to the Gov't, standing in loco parentis for the Indians.

In the course of almost ten years pursuing the lawsuit, they've racked up some serious legal bills.

Now the feds, as one might expect, have been coming off rather poorly in this. The judge has repeatedly taken them to task for present mismanagemnt, and other wrongs, in the course of the suit. Most recently he has awarded the Indians $7 million to cover legal costs.

The feds are willing to pony up. They are doing it by cutting money already budgeted to the tribes. The sheer gall of that is hard to encompass in a simple post.

1: I have agreed to pay you some money; completely unrelated to the lawsuit you are pressing.

2: I lose the lawsuit.

3: I pay you out of the money I was promising to pay you.

4: I have other sources from which I could pay you, but I won't use them.

Sweet, no?

My favorite part of this is this, Jim Cason, associate deputy interior secretary, said the cuts will include $2 million from a fund for lawyers performing tribal work.

Since they have to pay court costs, they will take it out of money the tribes were supposed to get for legal work. Sweet. This isn't borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, it's Paul stealing from Peter to punish him; for Paul's misdeeds.

It isn't as if the Gov't is happy with the judge. They've been trying to get him removed from the case (it seems they took it amiss when he said the problems were the result of evil, apathy, cowardice, or, as he put it the far more likely reason of "crushing beauraucratic incompetance.").

The Indians got lucky when they drew Judge Lambeth. The suit was brought in 1996, and both the Clinton and Bush administrations resisted it (the cost of doing an actual audit; to say nothing of what such an audit might reveal, is no small part of the reason), but Lambeth doesn't care. He, it seems, hates bad governnance.

Colleagues say Lamberth's strong prose is motivated by his government service and belief that it is a high calling. "He believes every person -- whether it's the president of the United States or an administrative clerk -- has a duty to serve the American people and do their duty as required under the law," said Mark Nagle, who worked under Lamberth when he ran the civil division of the U.S. attorney's office.

"I remember him calling up some senior-level presidential appointees and telling them: 'We can't defend this one. And we're not going to,' " Nagle said.

Lamberth's directness continued when he joined the bench. In presiding over several controversial cases involving the Clinton administration, Lamberth repeatedly accused government officials of trying to dupe the court.

In the November trial of Murder Inc. gang members, Lamberth spotted one defendant mouthing words to an ex-girlfriend as she reluctantly testified. Lamberth excused the jury, then let loose. "You sit down and shut up," the judge growled. "If you want to be bound and gagged for the rest of this trial, you just keep it up."

Lamberth has never spared the government in Cobell , and government lawyers say they cringe at his sometimes mocking tone. "You know any banker would be in jail for handling funds like this, don't you?" he told one Interior witness.

U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin, now retired, who was removed from a criminal case by the appeals court after not following sentencing guidelines, said Lamberth's motives are undoubtedly pure in Cobell , and the appeals court needs to acknowledge this litigation is "no tea party."

"Here you have a judge who is terribly frustrated," Sporkin said. "Every time he tells the government to get something done, they don't. It seems to me you have a bunch of crybabies that aren't willing to do what has to be done." (Carol D. Leonnig WaPo. date unk)


For more details you can go to Indian Trust.com.