Steve Russell: Indians often seen an obstacle to government

The U.S. is exceptional in that its written charter, by assuming the worst in human beings, seems to slowly, too slowly, bring out the best in human beings. All power in the Constitution is balanced by another power held by another institution. The separation of powers principle allows institutions to check each other.

Where there has been need to move quickly, the Constitution has been an obstacle and Presidents have played fast and loose with it. President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. President Truman nationalized the steel mills. President Nixon imposed wage and price controls by fiat. It all came out in the wash.

Except when it didn’t. President Jackson sent my people and many others on the Trail of Tears in violation of principles made up by Chief Justice Marshall. President Theodore Roosevelt shredded the treaty rights of the Five Tribes to create the state of Oklahoma, where I would be born and raised. The Supreme Court, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, would have written Indian nations out of the Constitution if they had been there in the first place.

If you read American exceptionalism as a claim of perfection, it’s nonsense, and this brings us back to the worthy John Winthrop and his partial quotation by President Reagan. After placing the Massachusetts Colony as a “city on the hill” being observed by “the eyes of all people,” he went on “so that if we shall deal falsely … in this work we have undertaken … we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. … We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.”

If you take “this work we have undertaken” to mean, as President Reagan meant, President Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” then we the people must keep our eyes on that end because the world’s eyes are on us. If we fail, we fail spectacularly.