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It is a sovereign challenge

Smith claims that robbing the freedmen of their citizenship is a sovereign act, but Indian removal was also a sovereign act. Sovereign acts and moral acts are two very different things. Smith claims that the Congressional Black Caucus is challenging the Cherokee Nation's sovereignty. Actually, what the CBC is doing is showing that sovereignty has consequences, and that when nations make refugees of their people by revoking their citizenship, they risk facing economic sanctions. Backlash against a nation's sovereign decision is not denial of that nation's sovereignty. Being sovereign means you can make decisions freely - it doesn't mean others have to agree with those decisions.

for the rest of the story:
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096417307

(What she fails to understand is: we live and are ruled ultimately by the US Congress - but we have a small group, the Congressional Black Caucus, who is a group within Congress that will allow no other members to join unless they are Black, so that's moral? Does not the US and Congress have some sovereign consequences as well...and again, they always refer back to that one article in the 1866 Treaty without claiming subsequent Congressional Acts, or the fact that this is the only provision they want to enforce in this treaty...cutting off funding to the Cherokee people to *force them* to do something is moral? This sword cuts both ways, whether the CBC likes it or not, Congress made the rules, let them live by them. Times change, folks change, get over it and let the Cherokee Nation govern their own.

Stacy Leeds quit the Cherokee Supreme Court to run for Principal Chief, that left a vacancy on the court which the Chief then filled - the Cherokee Courts have never been dissolved or unavailable for internal Cherokee disputes)

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