Before President Clinton boarded Air Force One for his Poverty Tour last week, he should have taken a $4 cab ride to the E. Barrett Prettyman Court House.
It’s a five-minute hop from the White House, and there in Room 21, he would find a dispute titled Elouise Pepion Cobell, et al. vs. Bruce Babbitt, et al., which constitutes one of those untidy reminders of our occasionally wayward history.
But Clinton was too busy making belated appearances among the nation’s disenfranchised, including those on the destitute Sioux Indian reservation in Pine Ridge, S.D. There, Clinton offered the prospect of modest tax credits and loan guarantees before splitting for the next stop on the Poverty Tour.
If he had gone to Room 21, he would have had a chance to proffer far more–namely billions of dollars owed many thousands of Indians.
For sure, if he had shown up, he might have been forced to squirm, as Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt squirmed Friday. And Clinton might not have been necessarily saved by the sort of rhetorical gymnastics the similarly adept and combative Babbitt performed in a muggy courtroom on a sultry summer’s day.
The tall and graceful Arizonan sat in the witness stand near U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, though in theory he might have been joined by any one of 58 predecessors in that job, or any in Clinton’s. They all share the blame for the indignity faced by Elouise Cobell, et al.
More Top Picks Best Color Changing Smart Bulbs For Kids Rooms
It’s just that Cobell, who grew up on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana and later founded the first Indian bank on a reservation, filed a lawsuit on Babbitt’s watch and was now sitting sternly at the plaintiffs table 30 feet away.
“This is not the first time I’ve been hauled out to be pistol-whipped by lawyers,” Babbitt declared, a regal bearing melding with thinly veiled disdain during a testy back-and-forth with Elliott Levitas, a stout and square-shouldered former Georgia congressman who represents Cobell and the other Indian plaintiffs.
I could understand the pique. After all, Babbitt’s career has been one of outstanding public service, especially when it has come to genuine efforts for the poor. Born to a wealthy mercantile family, he was genuinely unnerved by the poverty he saw in Bolivia while doing work for Gulf Oil as a young geologist. He decided to earn a law degree at Harvard, heading back to South America to work in land-reform programs. He returned home to do civil-rights work in the South and help establish desegregation programs, while also toiling on behalf of migrants and Native Americans.
He later became his state’s attorney general, then a well-liked governor, finally running for president in 1988 (his campaign spokesman was Mike McCurry) but, alas, won more plaudits from journalists, who admired his candor and intellect, than votes.
When Clinton was elected president, there were rumors Babbitt would fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Instead, he wound up as head of the Interior Department, which means overseeing the Bureau of Indian affairs, which means inheriting a mess. The biggest involves trust accounts set up by the government in the 1880s to compensate Indians for the use of their land, which the government began leasing to oil, timber and other companies for a fee. The government started breaking up reservations, giving individual Indians 80 to 160 acres each, but it didn’t trust them to handle their own affairs.
So the government was trustee and the lease money would go to the Treasury Department, which was supposed to send money back on a regular basis to individual Indians and tribes.
It is believed that there are about 300,000 accounts and, into those, it is believed about $300 million a year are paid in to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for leases on individual Indians land; most of the leases were never put up for competitive bidding and, thus, probably have brought in a fraction of their real worth. But nobody is really sure, which is the problem.
A mix of historical haughtiness and ineptitude has created a situation in which even a hotshot accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, could not find the records for what some believe could be far in excess of $10 billion worth of transactions. Andersen said it would need $250 million to conduct a proper audit and, even then, would come up short because of the paucity of records.
Huge amounts of documentation have been lost, in fires and floods, even buried in abandoned salt mines. Some of those that remain, principally in a storage facility in Albuquerque, are covered by rat feces with a deadly hantavirus, which means they can’t even be touched without risking one’s life–unless one is wearing one of those goofy, oxygenated moon suits.
The government concedes extensive problems, including not having an accounts-receivable system. It also admits having lost track of at least 40,000 Indians who deserve checks from the Treasury Department but whose addresses it can’t find. This is one of the many reasons a frustrated Lamberth has held both Babbitt and just-departed Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in contempt for delays in forking over records in the case.
During testimony that ran until 7:30 p.m. Friday and concluded with two hours Saturday, Babbitt conceded that the government has lost complete track of many beneficiaries. He concluded Saturday with an 11-minute plea for cooperation between the two sides. Heads shook at the plaintiffs table.
When Levitas earlier asked if Babbitt was fulfilling his “fiduciary responsibility to the individual Indian beneficiaries,” he triggered a tedious, if semicomic, exchange.
“I am working diligently,” Babbitt responded.
“Do I take that as a `no’?” said Levitas.
Babbitt did not directly respond.
“Can you give any Indian trust beneficiary an accurate accounting of their account?” asked Levitas.
“Yes,” said Babbitt.
“How many?” asked Levitas.
“I don’t know,” replied Babbitt.
Could the government provide timely reconciliation of the beneficiaries’ accounts? Yes, Babbitt said, but “in most cases, no.”
Can it provide accurate cash balances of their accounts? In some case, he said, yes. In most, no.
Levitas, dogged, kept returning to the question of fulfilling one’s fiduciary responsibility. Babbitt, who was a trial lawyer himself, knew where Levitas wanted to take him, and didn’t want to go.
So, is Babbitt fulfilling his fiduciary responsibilities? “I can tell you what I’m doing . . .” he began another response.
Levitas wouldn’t let him avoid the obvious and, finally, got the witness to arrive at the desired destination.
“The fiduciary obligation of the United States is not being fulfilled,” Babbitt said.
Whew. It had been like pulling teeth.
More Top Picks Best Chicken Nesting Boxes With Roll Away Trays
It is believed that the single largest group of beneficiaries is owed about $1,000 apiece. But there is perhaps 15 percent owed as much as $100,000 or more. Given the rampant poverty on reservations, that would be no small piece of change.
During his earlier, cozy direct examination by a government lawyer, Babbitt had recalled his first stint in private law practice in the late 1960s. He’d meet the tribal council at the Navajo reservation in Window Rock, Ariz. Many were elderly and had never once left the reservation.
“Most spoke not a word of English,” he recalled. “I wasn’t just giving legal advice, I was interpreting the outside world (for them). But times have changed. The tribes have people like John Echohawk.”
He was referring to a 50-ish man with gray hair flowing down his back who heads the Native American Rights Fund, is sort of a dean of the Indian legal community and sat near Cobell at the plaintiffs table. He did not change a dour expression when Babbitt uttered those kudos.
Yes, times have changed. But some folks are still getting shafted.
———-
James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.