Federal judge removed from Indian trust case

The AP reports:

Federal Judge Royce Lamberth has long been known for speaking his mind - most notably in rulings siding with American Indians in their battle with the government over their trust funds.

But Lamberth went a step too far, an appeals court said Tuesday, citing one particularly harsh decision last July in which he accused the government of racism.

In a rare move, a panel of judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ordered Lamberth removed from the 10-year-old Indian trust case, saying he had lost his objectivity.

“We conclude, reluctantly, that this is one of those rare cases in which reassignment is necessary,” the judges wrote in a decision reversing two other Lamberth rulings.

When he lambasted the Interior Department in a decision last July, the government petitioned to remove him from the case, arguing he was too biased to continue.

The department, Lamberth wrote in the opinion, “is a dinosaur - the morally and culturally oblivious hand-me-down of a disgracefully racist and imperialist government that should have been buried a century ago.”

Lamberth the Reagan pick,imagine that.