Things I’d Like to See a New Chief Executive Do

See page for author [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In February of 2016, I posted the following tweet:

Eliminate:
HHS
HUD
Ed
Energy
Transpo
Labor
Commerce
Ag
Interior

— ScottO30 (@gscottoliver) February 18, 2016

Since these are all departments of the Executive Branch, it seems to me a Chief Executive could eliminate them whenever he or she wished to do so. To create a new department, as George W. Bush did in 2002, the President must go to Congress to get money appropriated for it. But to terminate one? It would simply mean that any unused budget it had would remain unspent, and that’s a good thing, isn’t it?

In reverse order of their creation, I believe we should eliminate the following U. S. government cabinet departments:

• Education
• Energy
• Transportation
• Housing and Urban Development
• Health and Human Services
• Labor
• Commerce
• Agriculture
• Interior

Any legitimate Federal functions can be moved to an appropriate Department that is left: State, Treasury, Defense, or Justice.

I would leave the Veterans Administration separate from Defense, as the latter’s responsibility is active defense of the nation, while the former is charged with taking care of the people who have served the nation in that capacity.

I would even suggest that the Department of Homeland Security is redundant, and its important functions should be moved to Defense or to Justice, as appropriate.

Finally, the White House lists the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, and the United Nations Mission as separate entities. I submit that neither of the first two have any place at a Federal level. If the Federal government didn’t confiscate resources at such a high rate, States and Localities would have plenty to deal with any violations of their citizens’ right to life. And in my opinion, the United Nations does more harm than good, and the U. S. should withdraw from it (and maybe raise its rent).

Courts Don't Grant Rights, Either

This story from the AP was put on KOLO-TV’s Twitter feed today. In brief, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver ruled that an illegal immigrant’s rights, including the right to keep and bear arms, are limited and not fully protected by the Constitution.

Most of the comments are some variation on the theme of “he isn’t a citizen, so he does not have the rights of a citizen.” I have to disagree. The Constitution (or any other Law made by man) does not grant the people rights; it simply recognizes certain of the rights we have as people. The right to defend ourselves, our families, and our liberty is one of them.

I realize there exists a policy where convicted felons are denied the exercise of the right to keep firearms. I’ve seen an explanation along the lines of: when a person commits a felony–becomes a criminal–that person has broken the unwritten compact of society. He thus no longer has the rights society enjoys, including freedom and firearms.

In this case, however, Mr. Huitron-Guizar was not a convicted felon when he was in possession of firearms. He did plead guilty to being an illegal immigrant, though, so I suppose it could be argued that he had committed a crime that broke the societal compact. Still, he was not yet convicted when he actually had the firearms.

Which leads me to another puzzlement: why should this restriction apply only to firearms? Why would we not also forbid felons from owning any sort of weaponry after they are released from custody, including kitchen knives, baseball bats, and even automobiles? In fact, if one has been released from custody, doesn’t that signify that we are accepting him back into society? Why should we then restrict any of the human rights recognized as belonging to society?

But I digress. My point is that the Constitution does not give us rights, by the same measure that the courts do not give them to us.

Cherokee Nation v. BIA: National Implications

Apparently Rush Limbaugh was talking about this situation on his show on Thursday. I will try to lay out events chronologically, and present some analysis and conclusions.

In 1866, a treaty was signed between the United States of America and the Cherokee Nation. One of the provisions of this treaty was that the Nation would admit as citizens certain "Freedmen", or freed African slaves.

From 1976 to 2003, the Tahlequah, OK-based Cherokee Nation's constitution contained a provision that required the US Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), part of the Department of Interior (DoI), to review changes to it. In early 2003, the Nation approved an amendment removing that requirement from the constitution. Then in March 2003, they approved a measure excluding the Freedmen (descendants of the original slaves) from Nation citizenship.

In an election on May 25, 2003, Chief Chad Smith was re-elected. Chief Smith seems to be in favor of excluding the Freedmen. According to a May 2007 statement by Asst. Secretary of the Interior Carl Artman, the Freedmen were not allowed to vote in that election (which is logical under the March 2003 law). The Freedmen sued the BIA and DoI over this election (Vann v. Salazar, filed Aug. 11, 2003). The suit was later expanded to include the Nation by Judge Henry Kennedy, citing the 1866 treaty and the 13th Amendment. I'm not sure what the 13th Amendment, which bans slavery, has to do with anything, as the original Freedmen had already been freed, hence the name.

The BIA reportedly reviewed the election issues in 2003, and at first said it would not accept the election due to the exclusion of the Freedmen, but reportedly later changed its decision to accept the election. It was this decision that the lawsuit challenged.

On May 21, 2007, associated with the above-mentioned statement, Artman sent a letter to Chief Smith about the DoI's final decision that it was rejecting the 2003 amendment, thus invalidating the law excluding the Freedmen from citizenship and voting.

Perhaps worth noting is that in June 2007 the Nation held an election for Chief. Opposing Chief Smith was Stacy Leeds, a former judge in the Cherokee Nation who had previously ruled that the Freedmen could not be excluded from Nation citizenship. As of today, Smith is still the incumbent Chief.

On Sept. 9, 2011, the Obama administration DoI's Asst. Sec. for Indian Affairs, Larry Echo Hawk, wrote a letter to Acting Chief Joe Crittenden stating that the DoI has never accepted the "disenrolling" of the Freedmen, and if they are not allowed to vote in the Sept. 24 election (with Smith running for re-election), the Department will not accept it. Of course, this hasn't stopped Smith from remaining Chief since before the constitutional change in 2003.

Now the monkey wrench to throw in the middle of all these works is shown in this AP article published in July 2009. At that time, Mr. Echo Hawk sent a letter to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma in which he stated that they were "not the historical Cherokee tribe, which…no longer exists as a distinct political entity." Ms. Leeds, at that time the director of the University of Kansas’ Tribal Law and Government Center, said that the decision outlined in the letter stated the opinion that "reorganized tribes in this century [are] not necessarily the historic nations that the treaties are with."

It appears that Judge Kennedy (or another federal judge) must now decide whether that opinion is legally valid. If it is not, the result is a victory--albeit relatively minor--for the Cherokee Nation in the matter described in that AP article.

If, on the other hand, that opinion is vald, the courts should remove the Nation from the Freedmen's lawsuit, since their inclusion was based on the 1866 treaty. Also, if that treaty is no longer in force because one party no longer exists, it seems to me that the Nation can decide for itself who its citizens are--just as the United States defines laws for naturalization.

It Stands to Reason (Part 1)

The Associated Press reports (via Breitbart.com) that lawyers for the nation of Mexico have submitted a brief in support of a lawsuit asking to declare the newest immigration law in Arizona unconstitutional.

I believe it is precisely because they know that the law will not lead to racial profiling that they don't like it. They know that most of the people who will be turned over to ICE by local law enforcement, and potentially deported (whether to Mexico or some other nation), are criminals. Because the law stipulates that only another legal incident will result in legal status verification, most of the people subject to that verification will have been involved in a crime of some sort. That's the whole reason they don't want this law to stand.

That's my story and I'm stickin' to it!™