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| | |  Daryl Vigil, the longtime water administrator of the Jicarilla Apache Nation, is a wry, soft-spoken former casino manager thrust into the arcane world of high-stakes water law. | Photos by Patrick Cavan Brown for POLITICO | Though it’s nowhere near the city, the Colorado River feeds Albuquerque, New Mexico. It feeds Las Vegas. It feeds Phoenix. Even beyond the Colorado River Basin, it feeds Los Angeles, California and Salt Lake City, Utah. It feeds Denver, Colorado, too. Thanks to a vast network of canals and pipes, reservoirs and dams that took 100 years and untold billions to build, the Colorado River flows far beyond the Colorado River, through seven states and into the lives of more than 40 million people. It isn’t enough. Decades of mega-drought have shrunk the river at a catastrophic rate. And as dwindling water forces Western states to face down a daunting, dry future, Native Americans are being boxed out. The Colorado River feeds Albuquerque, but if it weren’t for all that infrastructure, much of that water would naturally feed the Navajo River, which according to Daryl Vigil, the longtime water administrator of the Jicarilla Apache Nation, has withered to a third of its former flow. It’s just one example of various ways Native people’s access to water is threatened. “As demand for the river’s flow increasingly outstrips supply, what makes up for the difference is a mix of cuts and involuntary charity on the part of the more than two dozen tribes,” writes Rowan Gerety, who went to New Mexico to report on the water crisis. There is broad agreement that the 30 tribes in the region have rights over some 25 percent of the Colorado’s flow. But they have no means of enforcement — which is where that ”involuntary charity” comes in. State and federal authorities are not required to negotiate with the tribes, leaving only the courts to offer relief. But in June, the Supreme Court ruled against the Navajo Nation, which had sued 20 years ago to force the government to create a plan to provide water to the 17-million-acre reservation. “The Navajo have waited patiently for someone, anyone, to help them, only to be told (repeatedly) that they have been standing in the wrong line and must try another,” wrote Justice Neil Gorsuch in a dissent. Native advocates aren’t giving up, though. Over the course of 14 years as a tribal water administrator, Vigil has become a leading voice in debates over how the historical harms carried out against tribes should inform the governance of the Colorado. “For me, it’s about bringing the humanization of indigenous people to the forefront of people’s minds and to their understanding,” he told Gerety. “Most people don’t have any clue who we are.” Read the story. | | | | A message from Meta: The metaverse will help students gain more hands-on experience.
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| “I don’t think he could run for dog catcher in this state and win again. I really don’t.” Can you guess who said this about Sen. Lindsey Graham? Scroll to the bottom for the answer.** | | | |  | | 
POLITICO illustration/Photos by Getty Images, AP, Wikimedia Commons | The War Over D.C.’s Buildings … So many federal buildings are famously ugly cement bricks: HUD. The FBI building on Pennsylvania Ave. Honestly, the Dept. for Health and Human Services looks like a Lego block with clinical depression. Which is why a Republican effort to mandate “classical style” for federal buildings is making its way through Congress. But should the government get to decide that style just stopped sometime around ancient Athens? “The fact is that in a democracy, there’s always going to be tension between envelope-pushers and popular tastes, between hewing to tradition and breaking the mold,” writes Michael Schaffer in this week’s Capital City column. “Legislating about style seems like a bad business.”
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| Can Zuck knock out Elon in one fell Thread? Too soon to tell — but here are our tips for how not to handle the launch of Threads, which Meta unveiled on Wednesday (from Jasper Goodman): - Don’t delete your Twitter. Yet. Threads is being called the “Twitter killer,” but it’s too soon to tell whether it will deliver a knockout punch. Users are flocking to Threads — but not yet away from Twitter. Remind your eager pals that none of the earlier Twitter alternatives, from Bluesky to Mastodon to the Trumpian Truth Social, have yet out-flown the little blue bird. - Don’t start treating Threads like Instagram. If you work in Washington, your colleagues are likely to be on soon, if they aren’t already. Like Twitter, you’ll have to thread the needle between the personal and the professional on the new platform. (Good advice for the eight presidential candidates and smattering of members of Congress who became early adopters, too. Still no Biden, Trump or DeSantis, though.) - Don’t let the morbidly online drag you into a personality contest between tech billionaires. When pressed, avoid staking out a definitive position: Just say you’re waiting to see who wins the cage match. - Don’t rub it in the face of your European friends that they can’t keep up with you on the app.
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Georgetown University, Healy Building, Washington, D.C., circa 1876. | Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. | A Sinful Past at Georgetown — and an Uncertain Future … In 2016, journalist Rachel Swarns brought national attention to the shocking fact that Jesuit priests sold enslaved people to fund what became Georgetown University. Now, she’s exploring the stories of those people — and the broader role of slavery in the church’s early days in America — in a new book, The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church. “I had never heard of Catholic priests enslaving people,” she tells Jesse Naranjo. “I was really astounded, and I've been doing this research, going through archival records of the buying and selling of people by Catholic priests to sustain and help the church expand, even as I am going to Mass.” In this interview, the two spoke about the overturning of affirmative action, the roiling debate over how to teach students about slavery and the future of diversity on campus.
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| |  Thousands of Southern Baptists traveled to New Orleans, La., last month for the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. | Photos by David Siders/POLITICO | A Fiery Southern Baptism … White evangelicals felt a sense of power and ascendancy during Donald Trump’s presidency. But since then, in their estimation, everything has gone to Hell. The battle over gay marriage appears long lost. The overturning of Roe has hit the GOP hard, contributing to a series of electoral losses. The waning of religiosity — and with it, the waning of the outsize political influence this 14 percent of the population has held in the Republican Party since the time of Reagan — continues. But much like the GOP, white evangelicals and Southern Baptists in particular have responded to this upheaval not by adapting, but by doubling-down on culture-war rhetoric: Speakers at this year’s Southern Baptist Convention, a gathering of the largest Protestant denomination in America, focused on a “teetering” nation, “sexual insanity” the problem of female pastors and “all this trans stuff,” reports David Siders, who visited the convention for his Road Trip series. “Rather than moderate, the response of MAGA diehards has been to focus on invigorating the base,” he writes, “which is what members of the Southern Baptist Convention seem to be doing, too.”
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| |  ebay, memorabilia111 | Last week, the 6-3 Supreme Court decision overturning race-conscious affirmative action in colleges highlighted just how much the court has changed in recent years. The only two Black justices, Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson, traded unusually personal jabs over their views of race. Thomas accused Jackson of claiming that “we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society.” In a dissent, Jackson wrote that it was Thomas who had “an obsession with race” and that he “ignites too many more straw men to list, or fully extinguish, here.” Jackson's eloquence brought to mind memories of her predecessor, Thurgood Marshall, whose seat Clarence Thomas now holds. “History speaks,” as Jackson wrote. That is certainly true in the collectibles market. With memories of Justice Marshall quickening, readers might want to see this press photo for sale, on eBay. In late August 1967, Marshall was in the news as a possible nominee to the Court, and obviously a history-making one, as the first African-American justice. This artifact shows the way news used to work, with detailed instructions about how to print it, written in colored grease pencil, and a lot of information typed, with a manual typewriter, by the very capable "gm." It can be yours for $333.27. (From historian Ted Widmer.)
| | | **Who Dissed answer: Who else but Trump, whom Graham has loved, and hated, and loved, and hated and loved again? This time around, in February 2016, Graham drew Trump’s ire for questioning his electability — just nine months before he was elected president. politicoweekend@email.politico.com | | | | A message from Meta: Augmented reality will help neighborhoods recover from power outages.
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