Tribal sovereignty foe Slade Gorton speaks out against Donald Trump

Tuesday, November 26, 2019  

Slade Gorton, a former U.S. Senator who was ousted from office after tribal leaders slammed his anti-sovereignty record, is still alive and he's speaking out against President Donald Trump.

In an opinion published in The New York Times, Gorton said it appears that Trump engaged in a "shakedown" of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine by withholding aid to the foreign nation in exchange for an investigation against a political foe. He said the type of behavior -- in which the president used the power of his office for personal gain rather than in the interests of the United States -- is the type one of America's founding fathers warned against.

"My judgment so far as an objective observer is that there are multiple actions on this president’s part that warrant a vote of impeachment in the House, based on corroborated testimony that Mr. Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, pressured leaders of Ukraine to investigate the Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden and his family," Gorton writes.

Gorton also has a message for his former colleagues in the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate. If they believe Trump did not commit impeachable offenses, use the process envisioned by the U.S. Constitution to exonerate him.

"If the president is innocent, use the process to surface those exculpatory facts so that Congress and the country can agree whether or not Mr. Trump should be removed from office," Gorton writes.

During his time on Capitol Hill, Gorton tried to eliminated tribal sovereign immunity and abrograte treaty rights. Tribal leaders said he used his position on the powerful Senate Committee on Appropriations to punish their funding requests when they went against his views.

In the 2000 election, Gorton lost the race to Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), who went on to become the first woman to chair the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. She remains an active member of the panel, sponsoring and co-sponsoring key Indian bills, including S.227, which begins to address the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

My Fellow Republicans, Please Follow the Facts (The New York Times November 25, 2019)