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Legislative and Lobbying A large part of our practice involves representation of tribes and tribal interests in Congress, which necessarily involves daily attention to legislative matters and a close working relationship with various congressional delegations and House and Senate committees. A measure of our impact in the legislative arena is that attorneys of our firm have often been invited to testify before congressional committees in key hearings on matters including gaming, tribal sovereign immunity and the trust responsibility.
We have successfully lobbied for a significant number of major tribe-specific initiatives including the Fort Peck Reservation Rural Water System Act; the Kickapoo Valley Land Transfer, which authorized the transfer to the Ho-Chunk Nation of 1,200 acres of federal land; the Colville-Grand Coulee Settlement Act; the Standing Rock Sioux Equitable Compensation Act; the Seneca Nation Settlement Act; and the Puyallup Tribe Settlement Act.
Our legislative activity also focuses on appropriations for our tribal clients, where we have experienced a great deal of success in obtaining annual earmarks for projects as wide-ranging as road construction, school construction, clinic expansion, water systems and natural resource protection programs. In addition to tribe-specific measures and appropriation earmarks, our firm is continuously active on behalf of our many tribal clients on substantive Indian legislation affecting all tribes, with our partners taking a national role in the development of key legislation such as transportation, Indian self-determination, welfare reform, ICWA, and trust reform.
In providing Washington representation to our tribal clients, we focus on knowing the tribe and helping the tribe achieve its particular objectives. As we see it, our role is: (1) to work effectively with the tribal leadership to understand the tribe's legislative priorities and objectives, (2) to develop with the tribe appropriate strategies for implementing the tribe's priorities and objectives, (3) to provide timely information and analysis of pertinent legislation, (4) to confer with the tribe in assessing how each piece of legislation affects its particular interests, (5) to draft testimony, position papers and other documents to support the tribe's initiatives, and (6) to confer throughout the process with appropriate House and Senate offices to advance the tribe's position.
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