we removed them because they had their shot in court. they filed nine motions to remove us. the judge denied all those motions, and we kept going, so -- and then they appealed that and lost the appeal, so we felt what are they here for? it would be up to the judge to determine if they have a right to have standing, and we feel they don't have standing so we'll let the judge make that decision as to if they have standing and if the judge sees they have standing, we'll give them the information they need. >> are the membership rolls available? have they been released to interior, to the court, to where? >> we have released them to the interior. i believe in 210. they have all of our records, and -- and there is speculation that we don't belong to the

original group. i'd like to make it clear that there is only one wappo group. >> who determines that? i'm assuming that the department has that information that they are able to run the traps to figure out if folks are who they say they are, if there's a -- a continuity of tribal organization and tribal groff nance, is that correct? >> yes. what was your question? >> who determines that? >> the department of the interior, yes. >> so they have everything they need in order to do that. >> we gave it to them in 2010. like i said, if they need a fresher copy, we'll give it to them. >> and the department advised you that you should go through the court to settle this. >> when we asked for administration restoration we did ask to do that, and we were advised to go through the courts or through congress, and -- and

we understand that there are political challenges in congress, and so we wanted a fair shot through the courts as recommended. >> so he recommended that even though he has all the documentation that you believe would determine your tribal status. >> i believe he has it. i don't believe they went through it. >> okay. i have no other questions. thank you. >> i don't want to question anybody here today. i just like what you've said and the sense that it shows the system is broke. i've always said that the congress should have the authority to issue recognition and not the bureau, and i think it shows when the bureau is not here that they still think they have the deal and that's the trouble with this congress, and it has occurred over the years. we've transferred the power to the executive branch, and that

always changes. i believe there's seven or nine standard that you have to meet, but we've had cases where they will accept one tribe, but they won't accept the other tribe. i'd like to see this congress, this committee work together and sit dunn with the people at this table and other tribes that wish to be recognize and set out the criteria that we make the judgment on, and it may be difficult, but i'd tell you it would be a lot stronger and a lot better. i don't like the interior, for instance, recognizing tribes without any input at all, even when they weren't recognized and didn't ask to be or were recognized. they overstepped their boundaries. do you have a question or comment? >> yes, mr. chairman. could i ask in regard to the department of interior, are they going to come to the committee to ask questions and the questions that i had today? >> i said we will have another hearing, and i'm not saying it's because we've got people from

virginia and -- here in this room, but we're going to move that bill again, and we'll see what happens on the senate side, but i suggest you talk to the senate side because the state -- i think the state recognizes your state. miss tucker, do they recognize you, too? >> we have no mechanism for state recognition. we were honored in 1894 and recognized in 1986 so we're a de facto state recognition. >> i again, mr. weaver, you've been recognized by the state? >> yes, we have. >> and if you're recognized by the state, and i know the virginia tribes were, mr. moran specifically showed that to us, and i just think that the -- for some reason there's a shortage of wisdom in the interior department, and i still believe my good colleagues that although it would take some time and

effort, i think we have the opportunity trust-wise. we shouldn't transfer power to the executive branch. we've done it over and over in all different walks of our life and i think in this case because of the nation to nation trust authority we have to do a better job, and we're going to try to do that, you know. any other comments from any of the members. mr. lujan. >> mr. chairman, two quick questions. >> go ahead. >> mr. gabaldon, the -- one of the criteria of 25 cfr-83, 83.7g. it states that the petitioner demonstrates that neither the petitioner nor its members are the subject of a congressional legislation that has expressly terminated or forbident federal relationship. >> i'm sorry. i didn't hear the question. >> section g states that the -- if you don't meet this criteria,

there's no administrative relief. you don't have the opportunity to pursue something administratively. what this states is the criteria is the petitioner demonstrates that neither the petitioner nor its members are the subject of congressional legislation that has expressed -- that has expressly terminated or forbidden the federal relationship. would your tribe fall into that? you wouldn't meet that cratia? >> we don't immediate the criteria because of the g. that's why we weren't able to use the petition process. >> i think that's important to note as we talk about this. some of the aspects associated with judicial i think recommendations from former assistant secretary and your pursuit that that may be one of the areas and it's important to note. because, you know, the tribe is in a situation where the land that is held and privately held and there's not public land in that area, has that been talked

about by the tribe at all? >> i'll tell you no land has been talked about by the tribe. the only land that we'd possibly seek from the federal government was blm land. that doesn't require any -- anything from the county because it's already in federal trust, so we weren't seeking land like the old reservation that's in private hands now. i will tell you in the beginning we did seek that land, and it was to make a statement to the federal government saying we want it back immediately. if you look at our first amended complaint, we had changed that because we understood that it -- it ruffled the feathers of the counties saying you need to go through the process. we're not denying the fact that we have to go through the process and we surely will, but right now it's not about land. it's about restoration, and it's always been about restoration. >> i appreciate that. thank you for the indulgence, mr. chairman. appreciate the clarification. >> any other questions. >> if not, i want -- >> mr. chair, i'd like to just

acknowledge or underscore what you said about congress' ability or power or authority to recognize. as of april 2011, according to the gao report, out of the 564 tribes that had been recognized, 530 of them were through congress, so i -- i trust the collective wisdom of the congress, and i appreciate the fact that the virginia tribes did gain recognition through the house, so, again, i'm very optimistic that the right thing will happen. >> and if i can be a little bit snide here, i prefer it going through this way and not through lawyers, and for those in the audience, if your hair is rising, good. i get very frustrated on the money that's spent on legal advice when it should be directly and not money but the petition to the congress, and i have a couple of lawyers sitting here so i have to be careful,

but i just -- i watch it every day, and it's a great industry that very frankly produces nothing. it absorbs money, and that's a terrible thing. a short comment and i'll adjourn this. go ahead. >> my short comment is the lawyer that we're using is very helpful and he did a lot of it pro bono. >> he must be an angel. there must be damn few of them. >> there's few of them. >> this meeting's adjourned. on "washington journal" tomorrow morning, we'll focus on the supreme court's decision to uphold virtually all of the president's health care law. beginning with susan dentzer of

health affairs journal and "washington post" supreme court reporter robert barnes. then from 8:00 to 9:00 eastern we'll speak with four members of the house, including republican conference vice chairman, representative karate mcmorris rodgers of washington, illinois democratic representative jan scha causeky, representative tom price, a georgia republican and pennsylvania democrat chaka fattah. "washington journal" is live on c-span every day at 7:00 a.m. eastern. the purchasing power of gold specified as a weight unit, for example, of any national currency was constant for a period of four centuries. >> it seems to me that the record of the gold standard in sum is a record by and large of growth in the macro sense and of personal accountability until banking or the micro sense. >> this weekend on "american history tv," louers lerman and

james grant look at the origins are departures and arguments for returning to the gold standard. that's saturday evening just past 7:00 eastern. also this weekend, more from "the contenders," our series on key political figures who ran for president and lost but changed political history. sunday, charles evans hughes ran against woodrow wilson in 1916 and was the last supreme court justice to be nominated by a major party. that's at 7:30 p.m. "american history tv" this weekend on c-span 3. author david betruza writes about the presidents. >> and harry truman goes to the white house and says to eleanor roosevelt, can i pray for you, and she says no. we need to pray for you. >> their campaigns. >> there are a lot of promises made. they said they would have to rent a very large hall, very much larger than this one to get all the people that jack kennedy promised the vice presidency to

that year. >> and their ideals. >> calvin coolidge may indeed have been the left jeffersonian, a man who as president believed strongly enough in the limits of governmental power and particularly a federal power to resist the temptation to extend it. >> this sunday on "book-tv," your questions and comments for david pietrusza live at noon eastern on "in depth" and also a middle east expert on the obama administration's response to the arab spring, afghanistan, iraq and the israeli/palestinian peace process. that's sunday night at 9:00, part of "book-tv" this weekend on c-span 2. next, a conversation on the $500 billion in automatic pentagon budget cuts that are scheduled to begin next january. a panel looks what the those spending cuts could mean for u.s. priorities. from the brookings institution, this is an hour and ten minutes.

>> i'm peter singer. i'm very excited to welcome you all back to this discussion on sequestration and the nation's defense. as i wrote about in a recent article in politico, i'm a bit frustrated by a strange thing that's happening in defense politics today. now, rather than focusing on the very compromise of both, and i'll say the word, tax rather than revenue, and -- and entitlement reform, that the congressional supercommittee was intended to force. the discourt out there in defense discussions seemed to be a cross between two strategies. one is a deliberate strategy to maximize the lefl of panic over what it might mean for the u.s. military and national security. i think i can't resist but

throwing across the idea that having more than 150,000 marines but that they would still somehow not be able to carry out a single contingency, or the idea that the navy would be the size of it was in 1915 but the equal amount of effectiveness as it was in 1915. i for example would prefer to have the class of marine today than one of the submarines back then. even two, three of the submarines back then. while we have that going on on one side, we also have a second strategy, to deliberately not plan or prepare for the very nightmare contingency we're laying out there. if this was the movie "spinal tap," the volume would be set to 11 while pentagon planners are being told to wear ear muffs. hysterical ostrich, as i

jokingly call it, may wake good jones and pundryry, but it is a very poor way to approach national security and planning. so today this panel is very much intended to get our way past that, to bring together a group of some of the nation's top experts and really dig deep into what the potential implication, the sequestration might mean, specifically for the industry and for national security as well as talk about alternatives and solutions, to treat it seriously rather than just turning the volume up to 11 and hoping something good happens out of that. so the panel today features dr. rebecca grant. she has her phd from the london school of economics. she worked for the rand corporation. she's presently the director of the general billy mitchell institute for air power studies, which is an air force association non-profit dedicated to studying all forms of air power. as well, she's president of iris independent research.

performing strategic planning for both aerospace and government clients, including the air force and the navy. then we'll hear from mackenzie egland. she received her masters from georgetown university and served as the presidential management fellow in the office of secretary of defense and joint staff. then she served as a research fellow over national security at the heritage foundation as well as a staff member on the 2010 defense review independent panel. she's currently a fellow in the maryland ware center for security at the american enterprise institute. finally, we're welcoming back to brookings tom davis, who is notably a former brookings federal executive fellow. behind that, a graduate of the u.s. military academy, has a masters in international security economics from harvard. as an army officer has was a program analyst for the army, military assistant to the second of the army. he also commanded in the third gulf war as well as an assistant professor at west point.

currently he's vice president for strategic planning at general dynamics. so a set of really great experts to dig into an important issue. so first we'll hear from rebecca, then mackenzie and then tom. >> thank you, peter. it's really great to be here today and to be on the panel with mackenzie and tom. so we're going to have a lot to talk about with the defense sequestration possibilities. i want to review two things very quickly, which you probably all know. one is, i think, that we probably all share an assumption that it's time for the defense budget to come down. as you know, we have been spending at historical highs. you've probably all seen the chart that looks at the d.o.d. top line. what always strikes me is that our spending in recent years has been higher than it was during the korean war. if you're like me, you pinch yourself and say, how did we get into this situation? but the fact about sequestration itself is really a frightening one.

you talked about "spinal tap," peter, but i was trying to think about a movie that would somehow give us a sense of what this is like. the only one that came to mind was the old james dean movie, "rebel without a cause." where at the final moment in the drag race the losing driver catches the sleeve of his jacket on the car, and it's fatal for him. there's simply no way to bail out of this. in fact, what we've seen is d.o.d. starting to try to bail out by throwing some programs over the side, by making some cuts. the hard thing about sequestration is that we have come off a period of three rounds of budget-driven cuts. again, we may all agree that cuts are in order. the problem here is that we don't see these tied to a national strategy, to strategic decisions about how we will direct these cuts. so sequestration is tough, then, and it's tough in its mechanics. as the first panel mentioned,

sequestration means quite simply a cut, probably about 10%, to each account. that means in it's 06, 02, 8675309, if it's spending $51 million in bisek r "a" d and take out laser, it's take out 10%. it's such a difficult way to go about cutting the defense budget that it's simply, i think most of us would agree, a non-starter in terms of sound, fiscal management. so i want to talk about two ways that we might see this unfold and tell you why we really need to avoid sequestration and get to the place we need to go, which is a strategy-driven, hard set of choices about our future defense budget. when we think about the worst case of sequestration, the image for me that comes to mind is a fire base in afghanistan or any place else that's not able to

get its c-17 or c-130 airdrop of water, blood, ammunition, whatever those troops have asked for, but there are other parts of the defense that are also likely to suffer. the one i want to talk about here is the r & d accounts. rtd-and-eve, research, test, democrat and evaluation. you all know what those accounts are about. they are comprise about $70 billion. so even if we have a stay of execution on program line sequestration, one possibility is for congress to go back to d.o.d. and say, all right, we're not going to make you cut 10% out of every one of these thousands and thousands of programs. we'll give you a bogey of about $50 billion for purposes of discussion and let you find a way to go at it. well, when you've got $70 billion in r & d, maybe that's a tempting target.

let's talk first about the basic part of that, the science and technology piece. 6-1 and 6-2 money. for those of you who are into that sort of thing. these are perhaps the little billions of dollars, but they comprise some of the most essential money for innovation. they include basic research carried out at universities and applied research that attempts to take new developments in nano technology or cyber and convert them into something with a useful military application. these little cuts can be quite important. if we have a case where we see them simply go away, we pay the price as a lost technology opportunity. but there's another problem, and that's in the remaining 50 or so billion left in the r & d accounts. this is money that goes into what the military likes to call demonstration and development. 6.4, 6.5, 6.4, 6.7. for the technocrats among us. what sort of things are in those programs?

it's really important. the army has work on its air defense system. the navy has big accounts in its joint tactical radio system. the air force, which has about $25 billion of that, covers some classified programs in that category. i think those are usually a lot of space programs. and also things like high energy laser and gps control. then defense y, there's another $17 billion in that part of the r & d budget. it includes things we really like. things like cyber. things like homeland security crossover initiatives and also ballistic missile defense initiatives. in short, these are not the kind of things we can afford to blindly slash, either through program level sequestration or through attempting to direct a big $50 billion bogey in one year into the r & d accounts. here's the reason we shouldn't do it. take something like the f-35 program. that's a program that along with

many other major systems still has some r & d money, although it's also largely a production program. and what we learn about other programs going forward, for example, to use another air force one, long-range strike, is pretty compelling about the costs of doing insufficient r & d. a rand study completed in 2011 found that insufficient r & d was a major cost driver in four major programs. those included f-35, the navy's now cancelled destroyer, the satellite and the army apache helicopter. take money out of r & d in the wrong place, and you'll essentially bank on more cost to that program when and if you restart it again. we could talk more about o & m and some of the other things. i think sequestration could also mean a tempting desire to take a lot of money out of that operations and maintenance account to essentially bench portions of the military, stand down the aircraft, bring the

ships back to port and do things like that. i think what we can see as soon as we look at concrete examples is that we agree the defense budget needs to come down. we need to look at what goes on after iraq and afghanistan. but slashing through the r & d accounts is not the way to do it. time to get to a strategy discussion and make those hard choices. >> okay. thanks. mackenzie. >> thank you, peter and michel, for having me on the panel. thanks to rebecca and tom for letting me sit up here. i'm going to take a little different angle. rebecca is a good friend. we've published together and agree on a lot of things. not everyone in the room agrees the budget has to come down. for debt reduction, if that were even the case. unfortunately the defense budget cuts have not been al gated to defense. that's the big elephant in the room. we're cutting defense and the military is owning up to it and they're patriotic and the chiefs are standing up to it and saying

we're doing it for debt reduction. actually, that's not the case. the president's budget that's on the hill right now proposes a generous net increase for every other federal agency and $1.5 trillion in new taxes. so d.o.d. is the only federal agency taking any sort of spending cuts. as you know, the debt's not coming down. but i agree with her broad points. i was just at a meeting with a senior air force official. it came up in one of the questions earlier. the discussion was about the active component cuts and the component cuts in the air force. it just serves as a great anecdote and example of how -- of what a knife's edge the u.s. military is operating under. high budgets aside. most of those budgets go to people. let's just talk about -- michel had me here talking about that other times before, and that's not what i want to talk about, but this delta of 1,500 people in the active air force and the reserve component air force and could they have done that any other way and sliced that any other way?

it's driven by force structure reduction. so a-10s, for example. you're familiar with the debate and the family feud that has spilled out into the public. literally, it can't be done any other way because they're on a knife's edge. to think there's all this more money that could be absorbed besides sequestration, that's really what i want to talk about here. the subject panel here is solutions. one of the favorite solutions i hear around town is nothing new, but it's any deal to fix sequestration is going to have more defense cuts, which kind of baffles the mind since we're already talking about the 487 and how difficult that has been to absorb. to absorb under the tranche one. so sequestration is going to get bought down, but it's not going away. that's unfortunate because i think that should be the discussion. you know, ultimately in the end, even if congress backs into sequestration, the pentagon will get flexibility. it will never come down to the program project activity level

because of the eloquent destruction that's been described up here on the sustaining today. so i've been thinking a lot about what are the solutions. let's get aside from how awful it is. i do think this is consensus that it was pretty ridiculous, and it was a silly bill that passed and it was an awful sophie's choice that was put into place for many members of congress. that is the sequester. so the solutions. i was at bloomberg news conference last week. i heard a lot of members of congress talking about sequestration, like senator mccain, senator levin, norm dicks, congressman welch, a bunch of others. i thought i might hear something new. i wasn't surprised i didn't hear much new. a couple things. washington loves to dust off the old plan that died before there was the new plan and recycle ideas when we have to come up with a new solution. i just figure i'd tell you what was going on before so you know where everyone is going to go. all the things we're going to turn back to when we have to have this conversation in the lame duck.

may or may not be the right solution, but we're not going to resurrect big, bold, new ideas. although i say steve made a great point on the last panel about the grand bargain. i've met with senator warner's staff. a lot of them want that grand bargain. they're not talking about it publicly, but there is the will there. it's not all gloom and doom. nonetheless, what are the old plans that died before we had the bca and are going to get resurrected in terms of any new conversations about a tax dale that ultimately allows people to have a conversation about sequestration. don't fool yourself. tax increases aren't going to pay down sequestration. that's just to get everyone at the table to talk about sequestration. there's no dollar for dollar offset here. same thing with obamacare, potentially. money is freeing up from the supreme court, for example. that depending on how they rule. well, let's dust off simpson/bowles, the president's commission because that's become a favorite position for a lot of

members because there was a lot of work and thought that went into it. what it gives us on the defense side is the exact recipe senator levin has outlined, which is there are significantly more defense budget reductions beyond the $487 billion as part of the budget control act. if to you break down just the defense side, and i think it's always great to look at these in mass. it's important because it looks at the whole budget, just like rivlin/domenici. that's one play and that's key one. i'm glad that if we're going to dust off any plans, it's a plan to look across the federal government and federal spending writ large, but if i'm just breaking down the defense piece, this plan centered around roughly $850 billion in total over a decade of defense spending reductions. now the baselines have changed so all the numbers are different, but you get the rough idea. focus primarily on modernization. f-35, v-22. pick your program. it's probably in there for reduction or cancellation altogether. but there were some ground breaking changes on a bipartisan