Dave Lundgren: Expose hate groups for their anti-Indian agenda

The hate group Citizens Equal Rights Alliance (CERA), and those like it, use similar tactics to disguise their fear of brown people in positions of authority. They disguise their fear and hatred with bogus legal arguments designed to rile up local resentment and to enlist new uninformed members and contributors. When their popular slogans and phony catch-phrases are exposed to the light of reality, however, we learn that their real problem is with the Constitution.

CERA, for example, uses two arguments to support their “equal rights” disguise. First, they suggest that recognition of Tribal sovereignty is the product of some obscure and evil legal maneuver designed to trample the rights of white people. Actually, the legal recognition of Tribal sovereignty is required by the express language of the Constitution.

Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution reserves power to the President to make treaties with Tribes and foreign nations with the "advice and consent" of two-thirds of the Senate. Though unchanged in the Constitution, that presidential power to treat with Tribes was curtailed by statute in 1871, but the constitutional force of existing treaties remains. In fact, Article 6 of the Constitution requires that treaties remain “the supreme law of the land.” Treaties with Tribes, therefore, are the same as those with other nations and the Constitution requires that Tribes be treated honorably as nations that have sovereign powers over their territories.