Tag: Native Americans in the United States

Montana U.S. Sen. Steve Daines told lawmakers in Helena on Friday to put party politics aside when considering legislation, emphasized the need to pass funding for border security and said it was critical to address the epidemic of missing and murdered Native women in Montana. U.S. Sen. Jon Tester spoke to legislators last month and U.S. Rep. Greg Gianforte will speak on Monday. Funding for a border wall was the trigger of a 35-day partial federal government shutdown that ended a week ago. President Donald Trump has refused any budget deal that doesn't include $5.7 billion for wall along the southern border. Stopgap funding re-opened the government until Feb. 15 and Trump has said there's a "good chance" he'd declare a national emergency to obtain funding for the wall. In December Daines called for using a "nuclear option" by changing the U.S. Senate rules to require only 51 votes to pass funding for the wall. Those critical of calls to build a wall along the southern border point out the fentanyl was seized at a border crossing, not at a location proposed for a wall. The economy was also a focus of Daines' speech, both its successes and where he sees the need for improvement. The Republican tax cuts passed in 2017 have benefited Montanans to the tune of about $1,000 more annually in their paychecks, Daines said, and told lawmakers not to add any more taxes following on the heels of cuts at the federal level. Montana legislators this week heard a bill called Hanna's Act, the main legislation in a package of five bills related to missing and murdered Native women.

There were so many women running, in fact, that many firsts came in pairs: Two Native American women and two Muslim women were elected to Congress. MC: Why did you want to run? I’m ready to work diligently, but I realize that things don’t happen overnight. MC: What does it mean to you to be one of the first Native American women elected to Congress ever? MC: How does it feel for you to share this victory with so many other women, Republicans and Democrats, who ran and won this year? How have things changed in the last 25 years? MC: What women’s issues will you take on in Congress? All this work and all this training that I had and all of my experience representing people from our community was something we really needed in Washington, so I decided to take on a nine-term incumbent because I felt like he really wasn’t representing our district, and that I could do a better job. I’ve lived in this community nearly all of my life and I’ve been representing people [as a lawyer] from this community from all walks of life for a decade. It’s hard to see yourself in a place when you don’t see anybody that looks like you, and that’s one of the reasons that representation matters.

It was the week identity politics ate itself. It was the week we learned that US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is between 1/1,024th and 1/64th Native American Indian. It was also the week that Harvard University — universally acknowledged as a bastion of American liberalism — was taken to court for discriminating against Asian-American applicants. Similar calculations were being made by Ivy League admissions offices as they sought ways to increase the diversity of their traditionally very white student bodies. Since the mid-1990s, Unz pointed out, Asians had consistently accounted for around 16 percent of Harvard enrollments. Now the advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions, which opposes affirmative action, is suing Harvard for discriminating against Asian applicants. Ninety-nine percent of “progressive activists” believe that “many white people today don’t recognize the real advantages they have.” But 82 percent of “devoted conservatives” reject this, maintaining that “nowadays white people do not have any real advantages over others.” It’s the same polarized story for the whole suite of identity politics issues: immigration, sexual harassment, Islamophobia, feminism. Eighty percent of all Americans, and an even higher proportion of the exhausted majority, believe that political correctness has gone too far. Only 30 percent of progressive activists agree. Only 40 percent of progressive activists agree.