Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia are backing Montana in its fight to prevent the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision from being used to strike down state laws restricting corporate campaign spending.

The states led by New York are asking the high court to preserve Montana’s state-level regulations on corporate political expenditures, according to a copy of a brief written by New York’s attorney general’s office and obtained by The Associated Press. The brief will be publicly released Monday.

The Supreme Court is being asked to reverse a state court’s decision to uphold the Montana law. Virginia-based American Tradition Partnership is asking the nation’s high court to rule without a hearing because the group says the state law conflicts directly with the Citizens United decision that removed the federal ban on corporate campaign spending.

The Supreme Court has blocked the Montana law until it can look at the case.

The Montana case has prompted critics to hope the court will reverse itself on the controversial Citizens United ruling. The 22 states and D.C. say the Montana law is sharply different from the federal issues in the Citizens United case, so the ruling shouldn’t apply to Montana’s or other state laws regulating corporate campaign spending.

But the states also said they would support a Supreme Court decision to reconsider portions of the Citizens United ruling either in a future case or in the Montana case, if the justices decide to take it on.

Legal observers say don’t count on the Supreme Court reconsidering its decision.

“It is highly unlikely that the Court would reverse its decision in Citizens United,” said law professor Richard L. Hasen of the University of California-Irvine.

At best, the court would listen to arguments and might agree a clarification is needed to allow the Montana law to stand. But even that is a long shot, Hasen said.

Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock argues that political corruption in the Copper King era led to the state ban on corporate campaign spending. A clarification of Citizens United is needed to make clear that states can block certain political spending in the interest of limiting corruption, he said.

American Tradition Partnership argues that the state bans unfairly restrict the ability of corporations to engage in the political process that also affects them.

Bullock wrote in a brief to be released Monday that the state does not “ban” corporate political speech, rather, it regulates that speech by requiring the formation of political action committees.

The Democrat, who is running for governor, said the upstart political corporations hoping to take advantage of unfettered spending are merely “an anonymous conduit of unaccountable campaign spending.”

Montana and the other states are asking the court to either let the Montana Supreme Court decision stand or to hold a full hearing. They argue laws like the one in Montana that bans political spending straight from corporate treasuries are needed to prevent corruption.

The other states, many with their own type of restrictions hanging in the balance, argue local restrictions are far different than the federal ban the court decided unconstitutionally restricted free speech. Further, state elections are at much greater risk than federal elections of being dominated by corporate money, requiring tailored regulation, the states’ court filing says.

“The federal law struck down in Citizens United applied only to elections for President and U.S. Congress,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman wrote on behalf of the states. “By contrast, Montana’s law applies to a wide range of state and local offices, including judgeships and law enforcement positions such as sheriff and county prosecutor.”

The joining states, unlike Montana, ask the court to go further and reconsider core findings in Citizens United. They argue, for instance, it was wrong for the court to say unlimited independent expenditures rarely cause corruption or the appearance of corruption.

And other critics of the Citizens United decision who believe the court was wrong to grant corporations constitutional rights, have intervened and asked the court to reverse itself.

“There is a growing bipartisan consensus that Citizens United needs to be overturned, and Montana is leading the way,” said Peter Schurman, spokesman for a group called Free Speech For People. “The Supreme Court has an opportunity to revisit Citizens United here. That is important because there is evidence everywhere that unlimited spending in our elections creates both corruption and the appearance for corruption.”

On Friday, Montana’s case was given a boost when U.S. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-D-R.I., signed on in support. The senators argue evidence following the Citizens United decision, where millions in unregulated money has poured into presidential elections, shows that large independent expenditures can lead to corruption.

The states who filed the brief in support of Montana are New York, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.

—

Associated Press writer Mark Sherman in Washington contributed to this report.

Taken from a hospital in his homeland and put on a plane for the U.S. after Chinese authorities suddenly told him Saturday to pack and prepare to leave, Chen Guangcheng embraced his new surroundings at New York University and renewed his call to fight injustice.

“I believe that no matter how difficult the environment nothing is impossible if you put your heart to it,” he told a cheering crowd at NYU shortly after arriving at Newark Liberty International Airport on Saturday evening.

“We should link our arms to continue in the fight for the goodness in the world and to fight against injustice. So, I think that all people should apply themselves to this end to work for the common good worldwide.”

Chen was suddenly allowed to leave China earlier in the day, ending a dispute that tested U.S.-China relations.

Dressed in a white shirt and khaki pants and using crutches, his right leg in a cast, Chen was greeted with cheers when he arrived at the apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village where he will live with his family. The complex houses faculty and graduate students of New York University, where Chen is expected to attend law school.

“For the past seven years, I have never had a day’s rest,” Chen said through a translator, “so I have come here for a bit of recuperation for body and in spirit.”

Chen thanked the U.S. and Chinese governments, along with the embassies of Switzerland, Canada and France.

“After much turbulence, I have come out of Shandong,” he said, referring to the Chinese province where he was under house arrest. The U.S. has granted him partial citizenship rights, he said.

Chen gave a short statement, which was greeted by cheers in Mandarin and English. He didn’t take questions from reporters.

The departure of Chen, his wife and two children to the United States marked the conclusion of nearly a month of uncertainty and years of mistreatment by local authorities for the self-taught activist.

After seven years of prison and house arrest, Chen made a daring escape from his rural village in April and was given sanctuary inside the U.S. Embassy, triggering a diplomatic standoff over his fate. With Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Beijing for annual high-level discussions, officials struck a deal that let Chen walk free, only to see him have second thoughts. That forced new negotiations that led to an agreement to send him to the U.S. to study law, a goal of his, at New York University.

“Thousands of thoughts are surging to my mind,” Chen said before he left China. His concerns, he said, included whether authorities would retaliate for his negotiated departure by punishing his relatives left behind. It also was unclear whether the government will allow him to return.

In New York, he said China had promised him protection of his rights as a citizen there.

“I am very gratified to see that the Chinese government has been dealing with the situation with restraint and calm, and I hope to see that they continue to open discourse and earn the respect and trust of the people.”

Chen’s expected attendance at New York University comes from his association with Jerome Cohen, a law professor there who advised Chen while he was in the U.S. Embassy. The two met when Chen came to the United States on a State Department program in 2003, and Cohen has been staunch advocate for him since.

Before leaving China, Chen asked his supporters and others in the activist community for their understanding of his desire to leave the front lines of the rights struggle in China.

“I am requesting a leave of absence, and I hope that they will understand,” he said.

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland praised the quiet negotiations that freed him.

“We also express our appreciation for the manner in which we were able to resolve this matter and to support Mr. Chen’s desire to study in the U.S. and pursue his goals,” Nuland said in a statement.

The White House also said it was pleased with the outcome of negotiations.

China’s Foreign Ministry said it had no comment. The government’s news agency, Xinhua, issued a brief report saying that Chen “has applied for study in the United States via normal channels in line with the law.”

Chen’s supporters welcomed his departure. “This is great progress,” said U.S.-based rights activist Bob Fu. “It’s a victory for freedom fighters.”

The 40-year-old Chen is emblematic of a new breed of activists that the Communist Party finds threatening. Often from rural and working-class families, these “rights defenders,” as they are called, are unlike the students and intellectuals from the elite academies and major cities of previous democracy movements and thus could potentially appeal to ordinary Chinese.

Chen gained recognition for crusading for the disabled and for farmers’ rights and fighting against forced abortions in his rural community. That angered local officials, who seemed to wage a personal vendetta against him, convicting him in 2006 on what his supporters say were fabricated charges and then holding him for the past 20 months in illegal house arrest.

Even with the backstage negotiations, Chen’s departure came hastily. Chen spent the last 2 1/2 weeks in a hospital for the foot he broke escaping house arrest. Only on Wednesday did Chinese authorities help him complete the paperwork needed for his passport.

Chen said by telephone Saturday that he was informed at the hospital just before noon to pack his bags to leave. Officials did not give him and his family passports or inform them of their flight details until after they got to the airport.

Seeming ambivalent, Chen said that he was “not happy” about leaving and that he had a lot on his mind, including worries about retaliation against his extended family back home. His nephew, Chen Kegui, is accused of attempted murder after he allegedly used a kitchen knife to attack officials who stormed his house after discovering Chen Guangcheng was missing.

“I hope that the government will fulfil the promises it made to me, all of its promises,” Chen said. Such promises included launching an investigation into abuses against him and his family in Shandong province, he said before the phone call was cut off.

Much as Chen has said he wants return to China, it remains uncertain whether the Chinese government would bar him, as they have done with many exiled activists.

“Chen’s departure for the U.S. does not and should not in any way mark a ‘mission accomplished’ moment for the U.S. government,” said Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The harder, longer-term part is ensuring his right under international law to return to China when he sees fit.”

New York-based JPMorgan’s trading loss, announced last
week, occurred in its chief investment office, which oversees
about $360 billion, the difference between deposits and what the
bank lends. The New York Fed is reviewing the structure of
investment units and similar businesses at other banks it
regulates, said the person, who wasn’t authorized to discuss the
matter publicly and declined to be identified.

Banks are struggling to manage an influx of deposits as
investors take advantage of a bigger federal guarantee and the
perceived safety of the largest banks. In 2008, President George W. Bush signed a bill that temporarily increased deposit-
insurance coverage to $250,000 per depositor from $100,000. The
Dodd-Frank Act overhauling financial regulation, which President
Barack Obama signed in 2010, made the increase permanent.

“There’s not enough loan volume to drive earnings-per-
share and to successfully reinvest all the liquidity,” said
David Hendler, senior analyst at research firm CreditSights Inc.
in New York. “So, in a way, it forced them to do this, and the
trade got away from them,” he said, referring to JPMorgan.

Bank Portfolios

Total deposits at institutions insured by the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corp. rose to about $10.2 trillion at the end
of last year from $8.2 trillion in the third quarter of 2007. In
the same period, total loans fell to $7.5 trillion from $7.7
trillion. Securities in bank portfolios rose to $2.9 trillion
from $2 trillion, according to FDIC data.

Still, there are “other ways to deal with” the gap
between loans and deposits, “and you don’t have to just take it
in,” Hendler said. “You could create an opportunity cost for
the depositor to go to some other bank.”

Bank of New York Mellon Corp. last year said it would
charge institutional clients a fee for unusually high deposits
as a flight to safety pushed money-market rates below zero and
left the custody bank flooded with client cash.

New York Fed spokeswoman Andrea Priest declined to comment.

JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said on a
conference call with analysts on May 10 after announcing the
loss that all banks have “these fairly large portfolios” that
invest excess cash. Dimon had encouraged the unit to boost
earnings by buying higher-yielding assets, including structured
credit, equities and derivatives, ex-employees said in April.

‘100 Years’

“I should point out to all the folks on the phone, you
could see — you can go to the 10-Q and see what people have in
those portfolios,” Dimon said on the call, referring to
quarterly report filings. “And some banks do some things, and
some do others. But to invest those excess deposits, you buy
securities. That’s been going on for 100 years in banking.”

Scott Siefers, a managing director at Sandler O’Neill
Partners, a New York investment bank and brokerage firm that
specializes in financial companies, said treasury management is
usually a “mundane task” inside most banks.

“Investors and regulators don’t like to see banks using a
securities portfolio as a major earnings driver,” he said.
“There is a knee-jerk reaction that says the bank might be
taking on some undue risk.”

Under Pressure

Still, banks are also under pressure to keep net interest
margins high, Siefers said. Treasury managers are feeling the
pressure to boost risk and earn returns because loan growth is
tepid. At the same time, they are trying to avoid getting caught
if interest rates head higher sometime in the next few years, he
said.

Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo has overhauled the
Fed’s supervisory approach from a bank-focused examination
process to a broader systemic view that compares practices at
several institutions at once. The main forum for such reviews is
the Large Institution Supervision Coordinating Committee, or
LISCC, which includes top supervisors from the Fed’s regional
banks and also economists, financial-markets experts and
computer modelers from the Fed Board.

“We have supplemented the traditional, firm-by-firm
approach to supervision with a routine use of horizontal, or
cross-firm, reviews to monitor industry practices, common
trading and funding strategies, balance-sheet developments,
interconnectedness, and other factors with implications for
systemic risk,” Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in a speech
last month in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

Capital Buffers

Federal Reserve Board spokeswoman Barbara Hagenbaugh
declined to comment. She said earlier this week that the central
bank, as JPMorgan’s holding-company supervisor, is studying
organizational issues around the trading loss to ensure that
they aren’t repeated in other areas of the bank. The loss
underscores the importance of capital buffers, she said.

The Office of Comptroller of the Currency said this week it
is examining JPMorgan’s activities and its transactions
following the $2 billion loss.

“Our examiners are also evaluating risk management
strategies and practices in place at other large banks to
validate our understanding of inherent risk levels and controls
of these risks,” said OCC spokesman Bryan Hubbard. The OCC
oversees national banks, including JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A.

Dimon announced his bank’s “egregious” trading loss on
May 10, two months after the biggest U.S. bank by assets passed
a Fed stress test that put its loans and securities through a
scenario of deep recession and a simulated global financial
market shock. The bank’s flawed positions on synthetic credit
holdings could result in an additional $1 billion loss or more
as they’re wound down, Dimon said.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Caroline Salas Gage in New York at
csalas1@bloomberg.net;
Craig Torres in Washington at
ctorres3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Chris Wellisz at
cwellisz@bloomberg.net

The states led by New York are asking the high court to preserve Montana’s state-level regulations on corporate political expenditures, according to a copy of a brief written by New York’s attorney general’s office and obtained by The Associated Press ahead of Monday’s filing.

The Supreme Court is being asked to reverse a state court’s decision to uphold the Montana law. Virginia-based American Tradition Partnership is asking the nation’s high court to rule without a hearing because the group says the state law conflicts directly with the Citizens United decision that removed the federal ban on corporate campaign spending.

The Supreme Court has blocked the Montana law until it can look at the case.

The Montana case has prompted critics to hope the court will reverse itself on the controversial Citizens United ruling. The 22 states and D.C. say the Montana law is sharply different from the federal issues in the Citizens United case, so the ruling shouldn’t apply to Montana’s or other state laws regulating corporate campaign spending.

But the states also said they would support a Supreme Court decision to reconsider portions of the Citizens United ruling either in a future case or in the Montana case, if the justices decide to take it on.

Legal observers say don’t count on the Supreme Court reconsidering its decision.

“It is highly unlikely that the Court would reverse its decision in Citizens United,” said law professor Richard L. Hasen of the University of California-Irvine.

At best, the court would listen to arguments and might agree a clarification is needed to allow the Montana law to stand. But even that is a long shot, Hasen said.

Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock argues that political corruption in the Copper King era led to the state ban on corporate campaign spending. A clarification of Citizens United is needed to make clear that states can block certain political spending in the interest of limiting corruption, he said.

American Tradition Partnership argues that the state bans unfairly restrict the ability of corporations to engage in the political process that also affects them.

Bullock wrote in a brief to be released Monday that the state does not “ban” corporate political speech, rather, it regulates that speech by requiring the formation of political action committees.

The Democrat, who is running for governor, said the upstart political corporations hoping to take advantage of unfettered spending are merely “an anonymous conduit of unaccountable campaign spending.”

Montana and the other states are asking the court to either let the Montana Supreme Court decision stand or to hold a full hearing. They argue laws like the one in Montana that bans political spending straight from corporate treasuries are needed to prevent corruption.

The other states, many with their own type of restrictions hanging in the balance, argue local restrictions are far different than the federal ban the court decided unconstitutionally restricted free speech. Further, state elections are at much greater risk than federal elections of being dominated by corporate money, requiring tailored regulation, the states’ court filing says.

“The federal law struck down in Citizens United applied only to elections for President and U.S. Congress,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman wrote on behalf of the states. “By contrast, Montana’s law applies to a wide range of state and local offices, including judgeships and law enforcement positions such as sheriff and county prosecutor.”

The joining states, unlike Montana, ask the court to go further and reconsider core findings in Citizens United. They argue, for instance, it was wrong for the court to say unlimited independent expenditures rarely cause corruption or the appearance of corruption.

And other critics of the Citizens United decision who believe the court was wrong to grant corporations constitutional rights, have intervened and asked the court to reverse itself.

“There is a growing bipartisan consensus that Citizens United needs to be overturned, and Montana is leading the way,” said Peter Schurman, spokesman for a group called Free Speech For People. “The Supreme Court has an opportunity to revisit Citizens United here. That is important because there is evidence everywhere that unlimited spending in our elections creates both corruption and the appearance for corruption.”

On Friday, Montana’s case was given a boost when U.S. Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-D-R.I., signed on in support. The senators argue evidence following the Citizens United decision, where millions in unregulated money has poured into presidential elections, shows that large independent expenditures can lead to corruption.

The states who filed the brief in support of Montana are New York, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.

___

Associated Press writer Mark Sherman in Washington contributed to this report.

Reuters

Elizabeth Warren is not a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Elizabeth Warren is not enrolled in the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

And Elizabeth Warren is not one of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee.

Nor could she become one, even if she wanted to.

Despite a nearly three week flap over her claim of “being Native American,” the progressive consumer advocate has been unable to point to evidence of Native heritage except for a unsubstantiated thirdhand report that she might be 1/32 Cherokee. Even if it could be proven, it wouldn’t qualify her to be a member of a tribe: Contrary to assertions in outlets from The New York Times to Mother Jones that having 1/32 Cherokee ancestry is “sufficient for tribal citizenship,” “Indian enough” for “the Cherokee Nation,” and “not a deal-breaker,” Warren would not be eligible to become a member of any of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes based on the evidence so far surfaced by independent genealogists about her ancestry.

“These are my family stories,” Warren has said. “This is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mammaw and my pappaw.” But so far she and her campaign have been unable to establish that her family lore about being part Native American is anything more than one of the most widely shared family myths known to American genealogical researchers, myths especially prevalent in Warren’s home state of Oklahoma, the state with the highest percent of Native Americans in the nation and one where the Cherokee are the largest minority group.

“There’s a running joke in Indian country: If you meet somebody who you wouldn’t necessarily think they’re Native, but they say they’re Native, chances are they’ll tell you they’re Cherokee,” said Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton, a spokesperson for the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, which with more than 300,000 citizens is the largest Cherokee tribe.

The New England Historic Genealogical Society backtracked on Warren’s ancestry, saying it has “no proof” of Cherokee descent.

Warren, now running as a Democrat to unseat incumbent Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown, has been embroiled in the controversy since reports surfaced that she described herself as a minority in a law school directory and was touted as a Native American faculty member while tenured at Harvard Law School in the mid-1990s. Warren has described herself as having Cherokee and Delaware Indian ancestry. Brown’s campaign has seized on the story to raise questions about whether Warren misled Harvard or sought to use distant Native American ties for professional gain, and hammered on the propriety of a blonde, blue-eyed white woman describing herself as a minority. But the biggest question raised during the fracas is the one no one has been able to answer: whether she has Native American ancestry at all.

Warren has doubled down on her description of her background and dismissed suggestions she was ever an affirmative action hire as preposterous. “I’m proud of my Native American heritage,” she said Monday in an appearance on CNN. “I’m proud of my family.”

Her inability to name any specific Native American ancestor has kept the story alive, though, as pundits left and right have argued the case. Supporters touted her as part Cherokee after genealogist Christopher Child of the New England Historic Genealogical Society said he’d found a marriage certificate that described her great-great-great-grandmother, who was born in the late 18th century, as a Cherokee. But that story fell apart once people looked at it more closely. The Society, it turned out, was referencing a quote by an amateur genealogist in the March 2006 Buracker Boraker Family History Research Newsletters about an application for a marriage certificate:

Lynda Smith said, “When Neoma’s son William J. Crawford married his second wife Mary LONG in Oklahoma, he stated on his marriage application that his parents were Johnathan Houston Crawford and O. C. Sarah Smith and that his mother was Cherokee Indian.”

No one has surfaced that document, and there’s some reason to believe it may not exist. Lynda Smith later wrote that she does not believe she ever saw it herself, according to a report by amateur genealogist Michael Patrick Lahey, who has helped lead a full court press from the right on the Warren ancestry story, along with other conservative outlets such as the Boston Herald and the blog Legal Insurrection. (Smith declined a request for comment.)

The New England Historic Genealogical Society backtracked on Warren’s ancestry in a statement Tuesday, saying the group has “no proof that Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great-grandmother O.C. Sarah Smith either is or is not of Cherokee descent” and that the Society “has not expressed a position on whether Mrs. Warren has Native American ancestry, nor do we possess any primary sources to prove that she is.”

The Boston Globe, which had taken the Society’s earlier statements as confirmation of Warren’s Cherokee heritage (“Document ties Warren kin to Cherokees“), issued a sniffy correction Tuesday about the “1894 document that was purported to list Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great grandmother as a Cherokee,” noting that “Neither the society nor the Globe has seen the primary document, whose existence has not been proven.”

But even were such a document to be found, Warren would not be eligible to enroll as a Cherokee based on it alone. To begin with, the Cherokee Nation doesn’t accept marriage licenses as documentation of Cherokee ancestry — let alone a document described as an application for a marriage license by a descendent of the individual claimed as Cherokee.

“Marriage licenses don’t cut it,” said Krehbiel-Burton of the Cherokee Nation.

Further, to enroll as a member of the Cherokee Nation, an individual must have had a direct ancestor listed among the more than 101,000 people enrolled on the “Final Rolls of the Citizens and Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory” between 1898-1914, now known as the Dawes Rolls. The Cherokee Nation is very strict about this, even keeping descendants of siblings of men and women on the rolls out of the tribe, as well as descendents of Cherokees who were living out of the area at the time the lists were drawn up in what was then Northeastern Oklahoma.

“If she does not have an ancestor listed on the Dawes Rolls, she cannot be considered Cherokee through this tribe,” explained Lydia Neal, a processor with the registrar’s office of the Cherokee Nation.

O.C. Sarah Smith died long before the rolls were drawn up, too far in the past to make Warren eligible for membership in the tribe (assuming Smith was Cherokee).

No direct-line relatives of Warren are listed on the Dawes Rolls, according to Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak (the doubled name is not a typo), the independent genealogist who identified Michelle Obama’s slave ancestors in 2009 in a joint project with The New York Times.

“The Dawes Rolls don’t lend support to [Warren's] claim,” she told The Atlantic.

The Eastern Band of the Cherokee, for their part, have since 1963 required individuals to be at least 1/16 Cherokee to enroll — and also to have “a direct lineal ancestor” on “the 1924 Baker Roll of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.” Even were Smith discovered to be Cherokee, Warren would not be eligible to join the tribe as someone who also lacks a direct-line ancestor on the 1924 rolls, according to Smolenyak’s research.

“If she has Native American ancestry, it’s likely quite a ways back and not reflected in more contemporary resources,” Smolenyak said.

“In her immediate pedigree there is no one who is listing themselves as not white,” the New England Historic and Genealogical Society’s Child told the Boston Herald after looking at her maternal line in late April.

And while many have pointed out that the current principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, Bill John Baker, is only 1/32 Cherokee, his background is not like Warren’s; he was “born and raised in Cherokee County” and is a direct descendant of “Nancy Walker Osage, an early Tahlequah business owner and Cherokee Healer” listed on the Dawes Rolls.

The difference between him and Warren is he has a direct-line ancestor clearly documented as a Cherokee whom he can name. So far, Warren has only been able to point to family lore.

Asked if Warren were claiming O.C. Sarah Smith or any other ancestor was Cherokee or if the campaign or Warren had reached out to a genealogist to research Warren’s background, Warren spokesperson Alethea Harney said she’d have to look into it, then declined to answer the questions in a follow-up email exchange.

None of this to say that a Cherokee citizen couldn’t look like Warren. Though it confounds many people’s expectations, the Cherokee Nation considers being Cherokee as much an ethnicity as anything racial, and given the tribe’s centuries-long history of intermarriage there are many Cherokee citizens today who do not look stereotypically Native American. As well, “there are a lot of folks who are legitimately Cherokee who are not eligible for
citizenship,” said Krehbiel-Burton, because, for example, their ancestors lived in distant states or territories when the rolls were drawn up, or because they are direct descendants of people left off the rolls for other reasons.

Fractional Native American ancestry is quite hard to prove to the standards of the U.S. government, which in many ways acts as the ultimate “birther” in this regard. Percentage of ancestry or “blood quantum” — the creepy and antique-sounding term used by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which certifies it for two of the three Cherokee tribes — is recognized by the Bureau based on original documents (such as birth certificates, Census records, and death certificates) through something called a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood, or CDIB.

Warren would need to be certified by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as at least 1/16 Eastern Cherokee on a CDIB to be eligible to join the Eastern Cherokee. The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee has an even stricter enrollment cut-off: “a minimum blood quantum requirement of one quarter (1/4) degree Keetoowah Cherokee blood” documented via a CDIB plus a direct descent from someone on the Dawes Rolls. Tribal citizenship standards are set by the tribes themselves, and not the U.S. government.

Warren has never attempted to join a tribe and had no documentation of her Native ancestry claim before the controversy broke, Harney told William A. Jacobson, a Cornell Law School professor, in late April. Instead, Warren has cited the sayings of her Aunt Bea, who was given to complaining that Warren’s maternal grandfather who “had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do” had not passed them on to her.

To be sure, the absence of readily located evidence of Native ancestry outside the oral tradition does not mean that Warren has no Native American ancestry. Genealogy is a complicated field, where firm answers are hard to come by quickly. Proof of distant Native American ancestry could yet surface, were Warren to hire a genealogist to do a thorough dive into her own background while she works on riding out the political storm.

But a lack of Native ancestry despite the family stories she’s heard all her life would also be consistent with one of the most common genealogical myths in the United States.

“Many more Americans believe they have Native ancestry than actually do (we always suspected this, but can now confirm it through genetic testing),” said Smolenyak in an email. “In fact, in terms of wide-spread ancestral myths, this is one of the top two (the other being those who think their names were changed at Ellis Island). And someone who hails from Oklahoma would be even more prone to accept a tale of Native heritage than most.”

She added: “There’s also a tendency to accept what our relatives (especially our elders) tell us.”

As for Warren, “I can’t confirm or refute Cherokee heritage without extensive research,” she said. “All I can say is that Ms. Warren’s scenario is a wildly common one — minus the public scrutiny, of course.”

Should the genealogists be unable to find supporting documents, Warren could also quietly pursue familial DNA testing, which might confirm Native American ancestry, even if records of individual ancestors or their specific tribal affiliations have been lost to the mists of time. Her one-time Harvard University colleague Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has promoted such efforts as part of helping African Americans learn more about their mixed ancestry, hosting a series of shows on PBS featuring famous figures tracking down their forebears using genetics and genealogy. (He’s also pointed out that many African Americans erroneously believe they have Native American ancestors, especially Cherokee ones, making it “the biggest myth in African-American genealogy.”) DNA ancestry tests are not dispositive, and even a positive result would not be useful for tribal affiliation or CDIB purposes. But it would silence her critics, and — more importantly — it would help her learn whether what she had spent her life thinking she knew about herself and her family was true.

“Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born,” Warren told the Boston Herald in early May. “These are my family stories, I have lived in a family that has talked about Native American and talked about tribes since I was a little girl.”

Many prominent figures in American life learn, once the eye of the national press alights on them, that they are not the people who they always thought — or said — they were. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, for example, grew up thinking she came from a Catholic Czech family. It was not until she joined the U.S. Cabinet that she learned her parents — not her great-great-great-grandmother, but her own parents — were Jewish refugees who had converted and misled her about her ancestry after losing their families in the Holocaust. “This was obviously a major surprise to me. I have never been told this,” she said in 1997, after the Washington Post broke the news. “The only thing I have to go by is what my mother and father told me, how I was brought up,” she said.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio spent years describing himself as the “son of exiles” from Castro’s Cuba, but the Post reported that “documents show that Rubio’s parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than two-and-a-half years before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power.” “I’m going off the oral history of my family,” Rubio said in explaining the discrepancy.

Public scrutiny allowed New Mexico Gov. Susanna Martinez to close off a potentially damaging story-line when it was discovered that a Mexican grandfather suspected of having been an undocumented immigrant was in fact a lawfully admitted 1918 entrant who obtained U.S. citizenship in 1942. Questions had been raised about him after news reports revealed he was marked AL for “alien” on the 1930 Census, but subsequent evidence proved that was incorrect — illustrating just how much trouble incomplete genealogical research can cause for political actors.

But sometimes genealogy also confirms family stories. Michelle Obama in 2009 learned a great deal more about the slave ancestors she always knew she must have had, and Smolenyak and The New York Times were able to “substantiate what Mrs. Obama has called longstanding family rumors about a white forebear.”

Warren’s story has become so politicized and such a hot potato in her race to unseat Brown that she’ll be in a sticky situation no matter what she finds.

The best argument she’s got in her defense is that, based on the public evidence so far, she doesn’t appear to have used her claim of Native American ancestry to gain access to anything much more significant than a cookbook; in 1984 she contributed five recipes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook published by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, signing the items, “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.”

Warren, who graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 and got her law degree from Rutgers University in 1976, did not seek to take advantage of affirmative action policies during her education, according documents obtained by the Associated Press and The Boston Globe. On the application to Rutgers Law School she was asked, “Are you interested in applying for admission under the Program for Minority Group Students?” “No,” she replied.

While a teacher at the University of Texas, she listed herself as “white.” But between 1986 to 1995, she listed herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty; the University of Pennsylvania in a 2005 “minority equity report” also listed her as one of the minority professors who had taught at its law school.

The head of the committee that brought Warren to Harvard Law School said talk of Native American ties was not a factor in recruiting her to the prestigious institution. Reported the Boston Herald in April in its first story on Warren’s ancestry claim: “Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, a former U.S. Solicitor General who served under Ronald Reagan, sat on the appointing committee that recommended Warren for hire in 1995. He said he didn’t recall her Native American heritage ever coming up during the hiring process.

“‘It simply played no role in the appointments process. It was not mentioned and I didn’t mention it to the faculty,’ he said.”

He repeated himself this week, telling the Herald: “In spite of conclusive evidence to the contrary, the story continues to circulate that Elizabeth Warren enjoyed some kind of affirmative action leg-up in her hiring as a full professor by the Harvard Law School. The innuendo is false.”

“I can state categorically that the subject of her Native American ancestry never once was mentioned,” he added.

That view was echoed by Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe, who voted to tenure Warren and was also involved in recruiting her.

“Elizabeth Warren’s heritage had absolutely no role in the decision to recruit her to Harvard Law School,” he told the Crimson. “Our decision was entirely based on her extraordinary expertise and legendary teaching ability. This whole dispute is fabricated out of whole cloth and has no connection to reality.”

And that’s the second arena where an absence of evidence should have some weight. If there’s no easily located evidence that Warren has Native American ancestry, there’s also no evidence Warren used her family story to boost herself into a Harvard job.

A huge tell — beyond the flat denials of two of the men who brought her to the school — is that Warren’s ancestry was not touted in 1995 in the Harvard Crimson as the Law School’s first Native American hire, despite the ethnic studies movement’s gathering force on the college’s campus at the time and continued controversy over the lack of diversity at the law school (as highlighted at a protest involving Prof. Derrick Bell and law school student Barack Obama in 1991). The Crimson article on Warren was titled simply, “Woman Tenured at Law School.”

“Liz Warren is a spectacular addition to our faculty,” Law School Dean Robert Clark told the Crimson. “She is a leading scholar in the fields of bankruptcy and commercial law, and she is one of the rare legal academics to have devoted herself to a large-scale empirical research project of great relevance to legal policy making.”

Compare that to the Crimson editorial that greeted Lani Guinier just three years later, which heralded her as “the first female African-American professor in the 181-year history of HLS.” While this article also repeated the claim about Warren’s ethnicity — “Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American,” the ’98 piece said — that information had so little penetrated the consciousness of legal circles that Guinier was quoted in the very same article saying, “Though I am the first woman of color to join the tenured faculty, I know that I will not be the last, and this is important to me.” Dean Clark said he felt hiring her would “attract other top scholars of diverse backgrounds.” He made no similar statement upon Warren’s hire.

What Law School spokesman Michael Chmura was doing when he told the Crimson in 1996 and the Fordham Law Review in 1997 that Warren was Native American is a question for the university, not the Warren campaign. And the university is duly being pressed on that question and others about Warren’s time there. (Massachusetts Republican Party Chairman Robert A. Maginn Jr., an alumnus of Harvard Law, has called on the university to do an internal investigation into whether Warren misled the university about her heritage.)

The challenge for Warren will be to withstand an ongoing barrage of attacks on the topic that seek to undermine perceptions about her character and honesty. “That Warren allowed Harvard to hold her up as an example of their commitment to diversity in the hiring of historically disadvantaged communities is an insult to all Americans who have suffered real discrimination and mistreatment, and Warren should apologize for participating in this hypocritical sham,” Jim Barnett, the campaign manager for Brown said when the story broke.

Warren’s campaign has tried to keep its head down and fight around the edges of the story, which it’s called a distraction from the issues Massachusetts voters care about. Senate candidates have survived far more potentially damaging controversies and gone on to win. But the longer the questions about Warren linger, the harder it will be for voters to feel like they know who she really is.

It’s prom season and along with the elaborate hair-dos, corsages, and heels comes another teenage ritual: drinking.

Schools around the country have implemented countless measures to prevent it, including starting prom in the late afternoon shortly after school, providing mandatory transportation from school, and even making kids walk a straight line to waiting buses.

But what’s harder for schools to control is what happens at the after parties that aren’t sanctioned by the schools.

In some communities, officials are telling parents to beware. Some 28 states now have some variation of so-called “social host liability” laws, which make it illegal for parents to provide alcohol to minors — even in the confines of their own homes.

Such a law made headlines in Massachusetts last week when a mother in the Boston-area city of Beverly was sentenced to six months in jail and another six months of home confinement for supplying alcohol to her daughter’s friend. She’s believed to be one of the first people around the country to be jailed for an incident that didn’t involve a fatality.

Some high schools, including Belmont High in Belmont, Mass., are now offering social host liability training, teaching parents about the laws. Michael Harvey, Belmont High School principal, said it’s important to have these trainings to make parents aware of what’s going on.

“We have conducted some surveys in the past that have shown us that it is something that’s going on in our community,” he said.

The local district attorney’s office put on the social hosting class. Parents who choose to provide alcohol to their children often do so under the belief that they’ll drink one way or another, and they’d rather be able to supervise them.

“There are a lot of anecdotal stories we hear where students leave the party and things go horribly wrong afterwards,” Harvey said. “It’s just a dangerous practice to have teenagers mixing with alcohol.”

In a recent seminar, there were about 30 parents in attendance. But Harvey won’t be satisfied until every parent has attended.

“I think everybody needs to hear it,” he said.

Carol Cohen, Belmont High assistant principal, said the seminars at their school had four different presenters, including an assistant district attorney who discusses what the law itself says. Another lawyer described horrendous examples of parents who had situations go horribly wrong when they tried to let their children drink in their homes.

Two police officers also talked about specific incidents in the Belmont community and what they do to try and keep children safe. 

“There was a question of how do I teach my child to drink responsibly, to which the answer is, until they’re 21, they should not be drinking,” Cohen said. “Once you start to drink, your judgment’s impaired and things can go incredibly wrong.”

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, from WBUR in Boston, is an essential midday news magazine for those who want the latest news and expanded conversation on today’s hot-button topics.

Terry Keenan

As spectacles go, there are few more universal and inspiring than the run of the Olympic Torch in the lead-up to the summer games.

On Friday, as the torch headed from Olympia, Greece, to Britain, it was hard not to see irony in the fact that the torch wasn’t the only thing making a swift exit from the Greek isles this past week.

By some counts, more than 2 billion euros were withdrawn from Greek banks in recent days as the deposit flight that began two years ago accelerated at an alarming rate.

This event sets the stage for another summer of economic discontent. That’s because the run on the Greek banks shows that Europeans don’t have to wait for elections to voice their concerns — they can just vote at their ATMs.

They can vote that way not just in Greece, but also in Portugal, Italy and Spain, where news that 1 billion euros were withdrawn from financial giant Bankia sent that stock reeling. There’s good reason the Greeks and Spaniards are hitting the withdrawal button: Remarkably, there is no Euro-wide deposit-insurance system to prevent capital flight from weak countries into stronger ones.

Little wonder that Wall Street last week suffered its worst week of the year, and rates on 10-year US bonds fell to their lowest levels on record.

So where do US investors stand after a rotten week? It is now up to European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and German leader Angela Merkel to come up with a European-style FDIC plan.

Fed Chief Ben Bernanke and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson showed that this can be done quickly and effectively when they moved to raise the insurance on US money-market accounts to $250,000 in the dark days of September 2008.

That crisis came a month after the Beijing Olympics, when all but a few of the billion-plus viewers sensed the economic firestorm coming.

Organizers of the London Olympics won’t get that pass. If Draghi and Merkel don’t act boldly in the next few days, the 2012 games will have a hard time competing with the bank run that could engulf the Eurozone this summer.

terrykkeenan@gmail.com

John Shinal’s Tech Investor

Facebook IPO: Perfect, in a strict sense

5.

Sells, who has been associated with the Rolla High School wrestling team longer than anyone else in program history, is beginning his second stint as Bulldog wrestling head coach.

The Rolla Board of Education approved the move during Thursday’s regularly-scheduled meeting. Serving as Sells’ assistant coach will be former RHS all-state wrestler Ed Sederburg.

The past several years Sederburg has worked extensively with the Bulldogs’ feeder program, the Rolla Kids’ Wrestling Club.

Sells, age 52, replaces Kellen Laws as RHS wrestling head coach. Laws resigned the position last month to move to the Kearney area, where he will serve as the head assistant coach for the Blue Springs South wrestling program. Sells had been Laws’ assistant the previous four seasons.

Rolla is the only school system Sells has taught and coached at, coming here in 1985-86. He is also a science teacher at RHS.

He previously spent a three-season stint as RHS wrestling head coach, which ended after the 2000-2001 school year. In addition Sells has served as Bulldog assistant wrestling coach under four different head coaches – Dennis Noel, Dan Haskell, Jeremy Jamison and Laws.

A all-state wrestler in high school, Sells captured a state championship in 1978 for Kirksville High School. He later wrestled at Central Missouri State in Warrensburg, where he earned his degree in 1982. He later received his teaching certificate in 1985.

“I just wanted a little continuity for the kids in the program,” Sells said. “I thought I could do something positive for the program.

“I thought Kellen did a good job with the program; getting them prepared to compete. He’s a good person.”

Sells takes over a program that has struggled with depth the past couple of seasons.

“We were a little thin last year,” he said. “We’re hoping to fill out and get some more numbers. Ed will really help with that. I’m pretty excited about the opportunities we have as a team.”
 

And Independent Bank, the second-largest lender based in Memphis, booked loans for two separate hotel deals.

Some homegrown banks are making more business loans. But most borrowers and bankers remain wary. The overall pace of business lending appears flat across greater Memphis.

“I think there’s general anxiety about whether the economy is really in recovery,” said Susan Stephenson, Independent’s co-founder. “Last year, things looked good and then we had that swoon. Are we going to have that again?”

Business loans made by 24 homegrown banks in the metropolitan area barely surpassed $4.3 billion on March 31, compared with $4.1 billion a year earlier.

The figures are estimates by The Commercial Appeal based on lending data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Banks whose headquarters are located outside metro Memphis, such as Alabama-based Regions and Georgia-based SunTrust, are not counted.

“Overall, I don’t think loan demand is where any of the banks want it to be,” said Louis “Bo” Allen, manager of Mid-South commercial and business banking at First Tennessee Bank, the largest bank based in the state.

Nearly 26,000 shops, stores, schools, plants, offices and agencies operate across the metro area. Few have borrowed for the big expansions that send loan volumes up and the jobless rate down. And some that have borrowed are not expanding. They’re replacing worn equipment.

“In many cases, folks are starting to make capital investments, but they are making them because they have to,” Stephenson said. “They’ve been deferring the spending, sometimes for up to five years.”

Although the unemployment rate has dropped in metro Memphis to 8.8 percent in March, compared with 10 percent a year ago, it’s falling in part because the long-time unemployed are leaving the labor force.

Spending by the 562,000 people who are employed isn’t strong enough to jolt many shops and stores into expanding. In February, the average weekly wage paid in metro Memphis dipped to $700.79 from $708.82 a year earlier, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported.

And while 1,000 or so area businesses sell to customers outside Greater Memphis, major expansions aren’t in order. Big companies such as Mueller Industries Inc., Pinnacle Airlines Corp. and Verso Paper Inc. are coming off tough months, while Morgan Keegan Co. and Thomas Betts Corp. have changed hands.

“We’re seeing some activity in Memphis,” said Marty Ferguson, head of national small-business lending for West Memphis-based Evolve Bank Trust.

But loan demand here has been tepid compared with Evolve’s other markets.

“Texas is very strong, and we’re seeing an increase in demand in Florida,” Ferguson said.

Still, loan volumes aren’t contracting in Memphis. The region is treading along, based on an analysis of St. Louis Fed business loan data. It shows:

Commercial and industrial loans totaled $1.5 billion on March 31, up about 2 percent from a year earlier. Bankers consider CI loans a forward-looking gauge. If a company is ready to expand and add jobs, a CI loan often buys the new equipment or work truck.

Commercial real estate loans held even at $1.1 billion. These loans often are used for expansions.

Small loans to business — small being less than $1 million — totaled $1 billion, even with a year earlier. These are generally considered loans to small firms, which predominate in Greater Memphis. About 15,400 ventures here employ fewer than 10 people.

Construction and land development loans dropped to about $400 million from $480 million a year earlier.

The St. Louis Fed, an arm of the Federal Reserve Bank, analyzes each bank and classes business loans in those four categories. The Fed’s data do not include Magna Bank, a Memphis savings institution with loans totaling $328 million.

Holding back some banks are hangovers from the housing and strip-mall construction boom. When the recession hit in 2008, many borrowers defaulted, bad loans piled up and banks in turn had to scale back lending.

Powered by land development and commercial real estate loans, First Tennessee in all of its markets had $15.2 billion worth of business loans outstanding early in 2008, compared with $7.2 billion in March.

“Our overall customer base is still paying debts down. But our volume of new loans (to new customers) has improved,” Allen said.

First Tennessee — it is six times larger than the other 24 homegrown banks combined — returned to robust profits only last year. Triumph and Independent were the lone local banks to make a profit in each of the last three years.

Triumph itself is now on an expansion course. Its commercial real estate loans soared 39 percent in a year, nearing $98 million on March 31.

Two weeks ago, investors put $12.1 million worth of capital into the 6-year-old Memphis bank. Each $1 in capital can support $10 in loans.

“Our goal is to double the size of the bank,” said William Chase Jr., the chief executive officer.

– Ted Evanoff: (901) 529-2292