President George W. Bush’s administration in late 2001 sued Alamosa County in the San Luis Valley in south central Colorado, demanding the county racially gerrymander commissioner districts to guarantee the election of a Hispanic commissioner. The Bush Department of Justice sued because, as a complaining witness testified, “To me, representative government means having somebody that looks like you, that understands what you do, and we didn’t have that.”
Specifically, federal lawyers alleged Alamosa County’s use of a state-mandated system of electing commissioners at large from residential districts, a law since Colorado statehood in 1876, violated the Voting Rights Act by preventing Hispanic people from electing their “candidates of choice.” Argued Bush’s lawyers, Alamosa County Hispanics’ “candidate of choice” was a Hispanic Democrat!
Although Alamosa County complied fully with state law, Colorado’s attorney general at the time, Ken Salazar, refused to defend the county against the federal lawsuit. Therefore, its commissioners turned to me. I agreed to provide pro bono legal representation, including to the U.S. Supreme Court, which earned me an inflammatory rebuke from Salazar.
At the time, Alamosa County had a population of 15,000. Most of the county is rural, with farming and ranching predominating. Its one urban center, the city of Alamosa, is where most businesses, most government offices, and Adams State University are located. Hispanics and Anglos have lived in the valley for over a century, intermarrying at higher than the national rate.
Fifty-four percent of residents were Anglo, and 41% were Hispanic, 70% of whom were born in Colorado. In 2001, Hispanic residents lived, worked, and owned businesses throughout the county. There was extensive integration and association between Hispanic and Anglo residents, socially and in business. In commissioner elections, since 1978, every Hispanic candidate who ran in the Democratic primary was nominated, and from 1984 on, Hispanic candidates prevailed in the general election three out of five times. Nonetheless, the federal government sued, engaged in a year and a half of discovery, including long witness depositions, conducted an eight-day trial in May 2003, and filed post-trial briefs. Throughout, federal lawyers argued that only Hispanic Democrats could represent Alamosa Hispanics and that racially polarized voting by Anglos prevented their election.
On Thanksgiving Eve 2003, a federal district court rejected those arguments, finding that “the Alamosa Hispanic population … is not an insular, monolithic, minority group [but] is, instead, diverse according to all measures … [, which] create[s] a rich tapestry of experience and views.” This diversity, concluded the district court, yields a “fundamental electoral truth — that to be elected in Alamosa County, a candidate must appeal to both Anglo and Hispanic voters.” In fact, “subtle or overt ethnic appeals” by Hispanic candidates “result in failure at the polls.”
Finally, the court flatly rejected the government’s contention that only a Hispanic and only a Democrat could represent Alamosa Hispanics: “The evidence is to the contrary. Hispanic voters belong to both parties and support Anglo as well as Hispanic candidates.” The Bush administration did not appeal.
All this comes to mind following the incredible victory of President-elect Donald Trump last month, and particularly its analysis by professor Victor Davis Hanson to TV host Piers Morgan in late November:
“[Trump] was able, for the first time in my lifetime, to replace racial tribalism with class solidarity. In other words, he said to people, if you’re a Mexican American truck driver, if you’re a black electrician, if you’re a poor white carpenter, you have more in common with each other than you do with your elites on the bicoastal domain. In other words, the people at Stanford University do not represent the working man in Michigan or the Latino/La Raza/Latinx media spokesperson does not represent the people I’m living around right now here in San Joaquin Valley.”
Hanson might have added, “The lawyers in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department in Washington, D.C., do not represent Hispanic voters, either Republican or Democratic, living in Colorado’s San Luis Valley.” In late 2001, I knew that, as did the Alamosa County commissioners who asked that I defend them, and as did their constituents. But that was lost on Bush, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and the former federal prosecutor brought in from Boston to run the Civil Rights Division. Little wonder Hanson called Trump’s appeal to voters, regardless of race, “a radical idea.”
Hanson argued that “radical idea” was crucial to Trump’s 313 to 226 Electoral College victory. In 2024, “he made unbelievable gains [with] Mexican Americans, Native Americans, Asians, and African Americans,” Hanson said. “That’s what [Democrats] do not want to confront because that’s the keystone of the Democratic Party: victim, victimization, victimizers, oppressor, oppressed. And they have this kind of Marxist binary, and people don’t buy into it, and especially minorities don’t buy into it.”
One minority group especially not buying into the Democrats’ Marxist binary in the 2024 presidential election was American Indians, 68% of whom voted for Trump, according to NBC exit polls. That “stunning turnaround” came after nearly four years of the Biden-Harris administration’s treatment of the nation’s diverse American Indian and Native communities as oppressed victims.
Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, “the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary,” exclaimed, according to NPR, that she “thinks about … the U.S. government’s historical policy of assimilation every day.” In fact, during the closing days of the Biden-Harris administration, Haaland led a ”nationwide healing tour focused on Indian boarding schools.”
Haaland’s top officials, from the Biden-Harris administration’s earliest days, led off meetings with land acknowledgments, “I recognize that I live and work with the ancestral lands of the [tribe]. I acknowledge the knowledge of these peoples, and I’m grateful for their ancestral and current stewardship of these lands,” followed by pronoun proclamations. Commentator Tucker Carlson mocked Interior’s “Public Forum on Federal Oil & Gas Program,” which was chockablock with land acknowledgments, as a “drum circle at Oberlin.”
Finally, 10 days before the Nov. 5 election, President Joe Biden made “his first presidential visit to Indian Country,” the Gila River Indian Community’s land outside Phoenix, Arizona, to apologize for off-reservation federal Indian boarding schools, which ran from 1879 until the 1930s, when public schools took their place. Biden “formally apologize[d] as president of the United States of America for what we did” some 100 to 150 years earlier.
It was not all handwringing, however. There was vote-getting to be done as Democrats expected Biden’s Arizona visit to “provide a boost to Vice President Kamala Harris’s turnout effort in a key battleground state … [that] he won just by 10,000 votes in 2020.” Instead, Harris lost Arizona to Trump by more than 187,000 votes, a turnaround of about 200,000 votes, many from American Indians. Obviously, neither Biden’s hat-in-hand visit nor his four years of treating tribal members as a racial monolith did the trick in Arizona. As statistician Nate Silver posted, “10-to-15-point swing toward Trump in Navajo Nation. Guess we didn’t do enough land acknowledgments?”
Likewise a failure was Harris’s six-figure digital, print, and radio campaign, launched on “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” or Columbus Day, targeting American Indians in Arizona, Montana, and North Carolina and Alaska Natives. Trump carried all four states easily. Similar was Wisconsin, where 70,000 American Indians were credited with Biden’s 20,000-vote victory in 2020. Nevertheless, in 2024, Trump was the winning beneficiary of an almost 50,000-vote swing statewide.
Why? “The economy, stupid.”
People ranked the economy as the most important issue in determining their votes for president. Not surprisingly, a September survey of 860 American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians, representing 230 tribes in 47 states, revealed their concern about “the high prices of everyday goods. Inflation was the top issue, followed by jobs and the overall economy,” per Native News Online. Little wonder. Having to choose between groceries and gasoline hurt American Indians hardest because tribal members, especially those on reservations, have the highest unemployment rate, the lowest income, and the top poverty rate.
The Biden-Harris economy is tied closely to the administration’s energy policy of killing fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal) while boosting wind and solar and spending billions of dollars subsidizing electric vehicles. The latter is particularly insulting to those in Indian country since electric vehicles are far beyond their ability to afford, are all but useless in the wide-open spaces they call home, and are decades away from being serviced by accessible charging stations. Biden’s energy policy is even worse for Western tribal nations with abundant oil, gas, and coal resources. On those issues, Biden, Harris, and Haaland listened not to American Indians harmed by their anti-energy policies but instead to radical environmentalists.
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Nor was Haaland listening to tribal leaders when she closed a vast area of the Navajo Nation, including private lands, to oil and gas development, when she moved the Bureau of Land Management’s top officials from offices near Indian country back to Washington, D.C., or when she signed off on Biden’s designation of a massive national monument in Colorado.
While not as crass as Biden’s racial appeals in 2012 and 2020, both of which appear to have been successful, Biden’s race-based entreaties to Indian country throughout his four years in office, which culminated in his end-of-term visit to Arizona, failed. Tribal members, like most Americans, remember Trump’s good economic times, reliable and affordable energy, and secure, relatively fentanyl-free border. Tribes also recall Trump’s appointment of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, dubbed by one writer “the best friend tribes ever had.” Little surprise that, for a sizable majority of American Indians, Trump was their 2024 “candidate of choice.”
William Perry Pendley, a Wyoming attorney and a Colorado-based public-interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court, served in President Ronald Reagan’s administration and led the Bureau of Land Management for Donald Trump.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
