Pierce: The President* Has Slurs for Native Peoples. Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan.

The President* Has Slurs for Native Peoples. Elizabeth Warren Has a Plan.
The senator professor wants to elevate Native issues to a Cabinet-level concern.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
AUG 16, 2019

In front of his usual backdrop of grinning suckers Thursday night, El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago trotted out his greatest hits to the roaring cackles of a few thousand of his fans. Inevitably, he got around to calling Senator Professor Warren, "Pocahontas," an allegedly humorous slur most notable for helping to end the career of Senator Scott Brown, presently learning the haka as our ambassador to New Zealand—admittedly, a pretty sweet gig out of which Brown almost leered himself....

(One of the most embarrassing tropes in our current political moment is the conviction among some of our elite political press that the president*'s magical sixth-grade insult power will fog the minds of enough Americans to carry him across the finish line. More likely, he will be seen as a twerp of a president* who brought on a recession.)

So, on Friday, SPW responded in the usual fashion. She brought out a 9,000-word plan by which she intends to confront the unique problems of Native Americans. It was drawn up with the assistance of Rep. Deb Haaland, one of two Native MOC's elected in the 2018 landslide, and it is as thoroughgoing as one can expect....

The most significant part of the plan involves what it calls an "Oliphant fix." In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Oliphant v. Suquamish that tribal courts had no jurisdiction over non-Native people who commit crimes on reservation land. The consequences of this decision should be obvious. For example, assaults by non-Native men on Native women on reservations became epidemic—so much so that, in 2013, Congress carved out an exception to the Oliphant decision and gave tribal courts jurisdiction over those particular crimes. Warren's plan would expand that exception considerably.

SPW will present the plan at a presidential forum on Native issues in Sioux Falls, Iowa, at the beginning of next week. The president*, of course, will be nowhere to be seen.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28722365/donald-trump-pocahontas-elizabeth-warren-native-americans/