The Justice’s textualism hands half of Oklahoma to Indian tribes.
In case you missed it, the Supreme Court on Thursday established an Indian reservation on three million acres of land in eastern Oklahoma. Wild. The 5-4 decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma could significantly affect Sooners, and it is also worth noting because it shows how Justice Neil Gorsuch’s textualist jurisprudence is careening in some odd directions.
In 1997, Jimcy McGirt was convicted by the state of Oklahoma for molesting, raping and sodomizing his wife’s four-year-old granddaughter. He later challenged his state conviction under the 1885 Major Crimes Act, which holds that “[a]ny Indian who commits” certain crimes within “the Indian country” must be tried in federal courts.
Mr. McGirt claimed he was a member of the Seminole Nation and committed the crime on land Congress reserved as a “permanent home to the whole Creek Nation” in an 1833 treaty. Since Congress never enacted a law explicitly reneging on the treaty, he said the land belongs to the Creeks. Justice Gorsuch and the four liberals agreed.
“Mustering the broad social consensus required to pass new legislation is a deliberately hard business under our Constitution,” Justice Gorsuch writes for the majority. “Faced with this daunting task, Congress sometimes might wish an inconvenient reservation would simply disappear . . . But wishes don’t make for laws, and saving the political branches the embarrassment of disestablishing a reservation is not one of our constitutionally assigned prerogatives.”
But as Chief Justice John Roberts explains in a dissent joined by the other three conservatives, Congress disestablished the Creek reservation through a series of laws. For the past century, the Court has determined whether an Indian reservation persists by examining Congress’s acts and “all the [surrounding] circumstances.”
Context is important. Lo, the Creeks and other tribes in the southeastern U.S. held 8,000 slaves and allied with the Confederacy. After the Civil War, the U.S. signed new treaties with the tribes declaring they had “unsettled the [existing] treaty relations,” thereby rendering themselves “liable to forfeit” all “benefits and advantages enjoyed by them” including lands.
Congress in subsequent decades leading up to Oklahoma’s statehood dismantled the tribal governments and courts, stripped tribes of taxing authorities, extinguished the Creek Nation’s title to the land and made members U.S. citizens. “The congressional Acts detailed above do not evince any unease about extinguishing the Creek domain, or any shortage of ‘will,’” the Chief writes.
In the century before the McGirt case, the Creek Nation never contended in court that a reservation existed on the sprawling land. Yet now they and other tribes by virtue of the Court’s reasoning may hold title to the entire eastern half of Oklahoma including the city of Tulsa—home to 1.8 million people.
Past convictions for crimes committed on the land may now be thrown out, the Chief points out, and the decision creates “significant uncertainty for the State’s continuing authority over any area that touches Indian affairs, ranging from zoning and taxation to family and environmental law.”
Justice Gorsuch sweeps aside these precedents and reliance interests because Congress has never expressly written a single law that disestablished the reservation. This sounds a lot like his misapplication of textualism in his Bostock opinion redefining biological “sex” in the 1964 Civil Rights Act to encompass gender identity and sexual orientation. Textualism looks like a tool to get the judgment he wants.
The Chief Justice doesn’t put it this way, but it’s clear he thinks that Justice Gorsuch in McGirt has turned textualism into an idiosyncratic vanity project. The Court’s liberals are making the most of it, and good luck with the consequences, Oklahoma.
How Elizabeth Warren Learned to Fight
She was Betsy to her mother, who expected her to marry. Liz to fellow high school debaters, whom she regularly beat. Now, the lessons of an Oklahoma childhood are center stage in the presidential race.
OKLAHOMA CITY — It was 1962 in Oklahoma City and Liz Herring, a new student at Northwest Classen High School, was feeling insecure. She was good at school, had skipped a grade, and now, as a skinny freshman with glasses and crooked teeth who had grown up in a town south of the capital, she was hungry to fit in.
She joined the Cygnet Pep Club to show her school spirit and the Courtesy Club to help visitors find their way around the school. She became a member of the Announcers Club, reading messages over the school’s central sound system. But it was the debate club where she really found herself. At a time when Home Ec and preparing for marriage were priorities for young women, debate was a place where they could compete on equal ground.
She loved learning about the big topics of the day — Medicare, unions, nuclear disarmament. She began carrying around a large metal box with hundreds of index cards with quotes and facts written on them.
She was competitive and had extraordinary focus and self-discipline, spending hours after school each day practicing. Joe Pryor, a high school friend and debate teammate, remembers her “ruthlessness in preparation.” By the time they were juniors, he said, “she was just flat out better than me.”
Oklahoma Faces Off Against J & J in First Trial of an Opioid Maker
J & J pushed back hard, arguing that the state itself looked the other way as its own drug review board and prescription monitoring program for years neglected to swoop down on sources of diverted opioids. In addition, it said, Oklahoma could not tie any death directly to the company’s products — Duragesic, a fentanyl patch, and Nucynta, an opioid pill it no longer makes.
.. “You hear about pill mills,” said Larry D. Ottaway, the lead counsel for a J & J subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals. “You don’t hear about patch mills.”
Indeed both sides introduced what are sure to be their signature earworms, themes that will be echoed throughout the trial, estimated to take about two months.
“If you oversupply, people will die,” said Brad Beckworth, who represents the Oklahoma attorney general’s office. He repeated the phrase to drive home the state’s argument that J & J sent squads of salespeople to persuade physicians of the broad utility of its fentanyl patch, indicated specifically for cancer breakthrough pain.
In doing so, said Mr. Beckworth, J & J convinced doctors to “start with and stay with” medications intended only as a last resort.
Return Medicaid to Its Rightful Role
The program should provide poor Americans with quality care, not shoddy coverage.
Over the same period, enrollment in Oklahoma skyrocketed from just under 500,000 to over a million. This means one-quarter of the state’s population is on medical welfare. Medicaid covers 57% of all births in Oklahoma, according to the Oklahoma Health Care Authority. Up to 72% of all children are on Medicaid at some point in their first five years, according to the authority. Government dependency expanded during a period of significant income growth here. Per capita income in Oklahoma grew 70.9%, from $26,720 in 2003 to $45,682 in 2016