For almost 10 years, Elouise Cobell, a member of Montana’s Blackfeet Tribe, has been trying to get the federal government to account for more than 100 years’ worth of egregious mismanagement of Indian trust funds.

The Interior and Treasury Departments admit that they made a mess of things. Yet government lawyers continue to play every litigator’s trick to evade responsibility.

In their latest move, the government has taken a page out of a preschooler’s book: If Mommy says no, then go into the other room to ask Daddy the same question.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee and hardly a pro-plaintiff bleeding heart, has said “no” to the government one time too many. So its lawyers are asking for Judge Lamberth to be removed from the case.

Like all good parents, the judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals should present a united front and remind the government lawyers that even they have to play by the rules.

The Cobell litigation is about the government’s utter failure to keep track of, account for, let alone manage the individual trust accounts of hundreds of thousands of American Indians.

Imagine that your grandmother had kept her meager savings in an account at her local bank. Imagine further that after a couple of decades of spotty notice from the bank, your grandmother decides to look into things because she is planning to retire. The bank tells her that they have no idea where her money is, or how much should be in her account, or whether she had an account at all. Then they tell her that any record of her account may have been destroyed in a moldy warehouse. As bad as this sounds, it doesn’t even begin to capture Interior’s treatment of Ms. Cobell and her fellow plaintiffs.

The federal government is used to inflicting its will on American Indians, and it is not particularly used to being held accountable for the many dramatic failures in federal Indian policy. Indian trust accounts exist because of the federal government’s failed experiment in allotment and assimilation, which carved up tribal land-holdings and forced a system of individual property ownership on many tribal members. The trust accounts were created to manage the income from individual Indian properties.

The federal government will never be fully held to account for the enduring damage wrought by this period, which included the break-up of Indian families and intentional destruction of cultural practices. Through this lawsuit, the very least the government can do would be to account for the lost funds that they promised to oversee.

Judge Lamberth may well have lost his patience with the government attorneys. He has been upheld by the court of appeals on all major substantive issues. Yet he has had to chide the government repeatedly to produce basic records essential to the case. It is telling that the order that prompted the government to seek to remove Judge Lamberth is a fairly basic one in most class actions: it finally requires the government, after nearly 10 years, to notify the class of the litigation. Hardly a shocker of a ruling. Yet the government is squeamish about some of Judge Lamberth’s language in the opinion. Judge Lamberth wrote:

“For those harboring hope that the stories of murder, dispossession, forced marches, assimilationist policy programs, and other incidents of cultural genocide against the Indians are merely the echoes of a horrible, bigoted government-past that has been sanitized by the good deeds of more recent history, this case serves as an appalling reminder of the evils that result when large numbers of the politically powerless are placed at the mercy of institutions engendered and controlled by a politically powerful few.”

This language is less guarded than what typically appears in a written ruling. But it is the rare litigator who has not been subjected to worse verbally, yet had to carry on before the same judge. Furthermore, given the content of Judge Lamberth’s quotation, it would be ironic indeed to reward the government with even more power by granting the extraordinary remedy of allowing them to judge-shop.

After nearly a decade, Ms. Cobell and her fellow plaintiffs are nearly there, toward something resembling an honest account of 100 years of injustice. Let’s hope the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals says no to the government’s childish plea.