here comes your man
The stealth just keeps on coming:
Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. has as sparse a judicial record on Indian law as on other hot-button issues, but briefs he wrote as a private lawyer in several major Native cases show a radical, possibly alarming critique of what he called the 'decidedly mixed legal legacy' of federal Indian policy.
The Gwich'in Steering Committee issued a statement of 'grave concern' over Roberts' nomination, calling attention to a brief he wrote for the state of Alaska in the 1997 U.S. Supreme Court case Venetie v. the State of Alaska. The court sided with Alaska, ruling that most Native lands there were not part of 'Indian country.'
[snip]
Said steering committee representative Luci Beach, 'In two landmark cases, Roberts has argued that the rights of the state of Alaska supercede the sovereignty and subsistence rights guaranteed to Native peoples by the federal government ...
'This is sadly indicative of the Bush administration's disregard and contempt for basic tribal and human rights, which has also been signaled by Bush's incessant push to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge regardless of the impact to the land or the people.'
The brief in the Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government case could well be crucial, however, as an indicator of a potentially radical departure on Indian law. Roberts, then a member of the Washington, D.C. firm Hogan & Hartson, signed it as counsel to the state attorney general. The case defined the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, at that point the largest Native land claims settlement in U.S. history.
Under the shadow of North Slope oil finds and plans for a trans-Alaska pipeline, the act made a radical break in policy and transferred nearly $1 billion and 44 million acres - not to Native governments, but to Native-owned and operated business corporations. The land could be bought and sold without restriction.
"Radical break" = activist judge? Survey says!
To the extent the term 'judicial activism' is used to describe unjustified intrusions by the judiciary into the realm of policy making, the criticism is well-founded.
Or whatever. The above case only involved a band of native people with a hankering to keep their lands intact and relatively free of whitey and his red-skinned shills - nary a bourgeoisie lib or soft-headed suburbanite right-winger in sight, so you can pretty much bet this won't rear it's head come the 6th of September.
After all, modesty, and a strange similarity to the Son of The Designer in Chief go a big big mile...at any rate, this should make plain the fact that, worse than being an anti-choicer - though fundamental to his Federalist creds and essential to his Admin-okay - what the Smiling John nomination is all about is having someone on the court who can be counted on to vote a certain way, A Judge of One's Own.
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