Presidential Decision Quotes
In recent years, presidents of both parties have refused to allow Congress in its oversight responsibility to question certain assistants or see certain documents that are not technically national secrets. The questionable legal principle, executive privilege, supposedly assures that the President can get honest confidential advice without the advice giver feeing intimidated that the advice will become public. However, Presidents have also used this principle to cover-up scandals, wrong doing, and incompetence. Since the President simply asserts the “privilege” there is no way of checking in any particular case to determine if it is an abuse or not.
Prior, the Military, worked hard to enforce the Fort Laramie Treaty which gave the Lakota Sioux Indian Tribe exclusive use of the Black Hills. Bu then gold was accidentally found in the Black Hills and white miners started to illegally enter the Lakota territory. Many of them killed Indians that they ran across. See Quotation 643700. President Grant, under huge political pressure instructed General Sheridan to stop enforcing the provisions of the treaty and keep the whites out of the Black Hills. They idea was to allow the miners to clash with the Lakota who would likely defend their sacred land, and when some whites had been killed, send the army in to “pacify” the Indians and use that as a means of relegation of the Treaty so the the gold areas would bee legally accessible.
