SENATOR BARBARA BOXER'S $8 MILLION INDIAN TRIBAL PROBLEM

What do you get when a piece of dead legislation authored by one liberal Democrat Representative is picked up and given life by a liberal Democrat Senator? In this case, $8 million worth of corruption. The Representative was Lynn Woolsey, who introduced a bill in 1998 that would reinstate an Indian tribe that had been ruled non-existent 30 years earlier by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). After the BIA determined that there was no evidence the participants of the revived tribe had any connection to the defunct one, the bill sat - until 2000, when Senator Barbara "don't call me ma'am" Boxer picked it up, made some changes, and Bill Clinton signed it.

Via Rick Manning at The Hill:

Shortly after passage, the newly minted Indian tribe declared that after much soul-searching, the only thing it could do was open a casino on the outskirts of San Francisco in the town of Rohnert Park.

The tribe turned its fortunes over to two firms to make its dreams of wealth come true — Platinum Advisers, a political consulting/lobbying firm, and Kenwood Investments 2. Amazingly, and I’m certain quite coincidentally, Barbara Boxer’s son, Doug, was a partner in each firm.

To avoid immediate citizen concern about a casino popping up in their posh neighborhood, Doug Boxer’s Kenwood Investments 2 kindly fronted for the casino interests in purchasing a tract of land in Rohnert Park, as well as helpfully taking options on adjoining parcels of land for themselves to sweeten the pot. (Can I say pot and Sonoma County, Calif., in the same breath?)

Then Platinum Advisers sprang into action to try to gain community support for the casino. They apparently didn’t do a very good job, because the casino still is not built 10 years later.

According to Reference.com, Doug Boxer’s take from the project was a very Abramoff-like $8 million.

The best part of all this comes at the end of Manning's piece, which only serves to validate the decision of the BIA back in 1998. The "Chief" of the revived tribe could hardly be considered an Indian, let alone one with ancestors from this tribe.

Of course, my favorite part of this story is the poor bedraggled, downtrodden Indian chief, Greg Sarris. You see, poor Greg Sarris is a Ph.D. who has served as a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Dr. Chief Sarris, according to his own biographical story, was adopted out when he was born, never meeting his natural parents. At some point in his life, like many who have been adopted, he wanted to know about his birth parents, and began to research. He discovered that his mother was deceased, and his father’s name was unlisted on the birth certificate. His mother was not a Native American.

It's then revealed that Sarris' father, Emilio Hilario, was Filipino but that his mother's father had "some Indian ancestry."

So the chief of a rejuvenated Indian tribe had less than a smidgeon of Indian blood in his ancestry and was able to start an entire tribe, which resulted in the Boxer family becoming $8 million richer.

Wow.

h/t to Weasel Zippers