The Democratic Difficulties of Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta

Abstract

The Supreme Court, some commentators argue, is at its most undemocratic since the Lochner Era in the 1930s. They point to the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which departs from public opinion on abortion and longstanding constitutional precedence. Dobbs, however, is not an outlier. The Supreme Court made a similar move in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta. The majority opinion questioned almost 200 years of constitutional interpretation and several decades of congressional policy to enable state governments to exercise criminal authority over non-Indians in Indian Country. This article compares the majority opinion in Castro-Huerta to congressional policy to explore the democratic and constitutional difficulties that can arise when the Supreme Court refuses to defer to Congress—the democratically elected and constitutionally appointed institution for making federal Indian policy. It reveals how the Court’s undemocratic turn extends beyond cases involving individual rights.

Keywords:

• Judicial politics
• democracy
• American Indians

Disclosure statement

The author reports that there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

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2 Robert Dahl, “Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy Maker,” Journal of Public Law 6, no. 2 (1957): 279–95.

3 Jonathan D. Casper, “The Supreme Court and National Policy,” American Political Science Review 70, no. 1 (March 1976): 50–63; Gerald Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change? (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991); Michael McCann, Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994); Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (Oxford: Oxford University, 2004); Malcolm M. Feeley & Edward L. Rubin, Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America’s Prisons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

4 Daniel Epps and Ganesh Sitaraman, “Supreme Court Reform and American Democracy,” Yale Law Journal Forum 130 (2021): 821–51; David R. Lurie, “The Supreme Court is Democracy’s Enemy Now,” The Daily Beast, February 5, 2021.

5 Michael J. Klarman, “The Degradation of American Democracy—and the Court,” Harvard Law Review 134 (2020): 1–264.

6 Scott Lemieux, “The Counter-Majoritarian Difficulties of Hobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health: Why Overruling Roe Will Diminish American Democracy,” New Political Science 44, no. 3 (2022): 475–82.

7 Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, __ U.S. __, 142 S. Ct. 2486 (2022).

8 Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970); Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

9 Kirsten Matoy Carlson, “Congress and Indians,” Colorado Law Review 86, no. 1 (2015): 77–179; David E. Wilkins & Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, American Indian Politics and the American Political System (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2011).

10 Jane Mansbridge, “Rethinking Representation,” The American Political Science Review 97, no. 4 (2003): 515–28; Nadia Urbinati and Mark E. Warren, “The Concept of Representation in Contemporary Democratic Theory,” Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008): 387–412.

11 Lonewolf v. Hitchcock, 183 U.S. 553 (1903); United States v. Lara, 541 U.S. 193 (2004); McGirt v. Oklahoma, 140 S. Ct. 2452 (2020).

12 Fletcher, Federal Indian Law, 43.

13 Carlson, Bringing Congress and Indians Back.

14 Ibid.

15 Matthew L.M. Fletcher, “Factbound and Splitless: The Certiorari Process as a Barrier to Justice for Indian Tribes,” Arizona Law Review 51(2009): 933–82.

16 Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191, 195 (1978); Moe v. Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, 425 U.S. 463, 478–83 (1976).

17 Klarman, The Degradation of American Democracy.

18 Richard H. Pildes, “Is the Supreme Court a ‘Majoritarian’ Institution?” The Supreme Court Review 2010, no. 1 (January 2011):103–58; Casper, The Supreme Court and National Policy.

19 Gregory A. Caldeia and James L. Gibson, “The Etiology of Public Support for the Supreme Court,” American Journal of Political Science 36 (1992): 635–64; Robert H. Durr, Andrew D. Martin, and Christina Wolbrecht, “Ideological Divergence and Public Support for the Supreme Court,” American Journal of Political Science 44 (2000): 768–76; William Mishler and Reginald Sheehan, “Public Opinion, the Attitudinal Model, and the Supreme Court: A Micro-Analytic Perspective,” Journal of Politics 58 (1996): 169.

20 Stephen Breyer, Making Our Democracy Work: A Judge’s View (New York: Knoph, 2010).

21 Klarman, The Degradation of American Democracy.

22 Nickolas Bowie, “Antidemocracy,” Harvard Law Review 135 (2021): 160–219.

23 John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980).

24 Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope.

25 Dahl, Decision-making in a Democracy.

26 Ibid., 279–80.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid.

29 Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope.

30 Lemieux, “The Counter-Majoritarian Difficulties of Hobbs.”

31 Carol Goldberg-Ambrose, “Of Native Americans and Tribal Members: The Impact of Law on Indian Group Life,” Law and Society Review 28 (1994): 1125–26.

32 Felix S. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1941), xxiii, 122–23; Nell Jessup Newton, ed., Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law (LexisNexis, 2012), 2; Alex Tallchief Skibine, “Dualism and the Dialogic of Incorporation in Federal Indian Law,” Harvard Law Review Forum 119 (2005): 28; David H. Getches, “Beyond Indian Law: The Rehnquist Court’s Pursuit of States’ Rights, Colorblind Justice, and Mainstream Values,” Minnesota Law Review 86 (2001): 269–73.

33 Matthew L.M. Fletcher, “Tribal Consent,” Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties 8, no. 1 (2012): 45–122.

34 Gregory Ablavsky, “Beyond the Indian Commerce Clause,” Yale Law Journal 124 (2015): 1012.

35 Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832).

36 United States v. McBratney, 104 U.S. 621 (1881); Draper v. United States, 164 U.S. 240 (1896).

37 David E. Wilkins, “Tribal-State Affairs: American States as ‘Disclaiming’ Sovereigns,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 28, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 55–81.

38 Pub. L. 83-280 (1953).

39 David Adamany and Stephen Meinhold, “Robert Dahl: Democracy, Judicial Review, and the Study of Law and Courts,” in The Pioneers of Judicial Behavior, ed. Nancy Maveety (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009); Pildes, Is the Supreme Court a ‘Majoritarian’ Institution?

40 Dahl, Decision-making in a Democracy.

41 31 U.S. 515 (1832).

42 Carlson, Bringing Congress and Indians Back.

43 Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Federal Indian Law (St. Paul, MN: West Academic Publishing, 2016), Ch. 3.

44 Stephen Cornell, “The New Indian Politics,” Wilson Quarterly 10 (1986): 204–05.

45 Emma R. Gross, Contemporary Federal Policy Toward American Indians (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 78; Matthew L.M. Fletcher, “The Supreme Court and Federal Indian Policy,” Nebraska Law Review 85 (2006): 121–85.

46 Carlson, Bringing Congress and Indians Back.

47 Pub. L. 83-280 (1953) (granting six states criminal and civil authority over Indian country within their states and authorizing additional states to assume jurisdiction); Carole Goldberg, Tribal Jurisdictional Status Analysis, Tribal Court Clearing House (last updated February 16, 2010) at http://www.tribal-institute.org/lists/tjsa.htm (listing which states have authority to exercise jurisdiction in Indian Country).

48 Alan R. Parker, Pathways to Indigenous Nation Sovereignty: A Chronicle of Federal Policy Developments (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2018).

49 25 U.S.C. §§ 1321–1322. It also allowed for state governments to ask Congress to rescind their authority over Indian affairs.

50 Instead, states have sought to retrocede or give back jurisdiction in Indian Country. Robert T. Anderson, “Negotiating Jurisdiction: Retroceding State Authority over Indian Country Granted by Public Law 280,” Washington Law Review 87, no. 4 (2012): 951–56; Carole Goldberg and Duane Champagne, “Searching for an Exit: The Indian Civil Rights Act and Public Law 280,” in The Indian Civil Rights Act at Forty, eds. Kristen Carpenter, Matthew L.M. Fletcher, and Angela Riley (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2012).

51 Carlson, Bringing Congress and Indians Back; Kirsten Matoy Carlson, “Congress, Tribal Recognition, and Legislative-Administrative Multiplicity,” Indiana Law Journal 91, no. 3 (2016): 988–91.

52 Franklin Ducheneaux, “The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act: Background and Legislative History,” Arizona State Law Journal 42 (2010):142–52; Pub. L. 100–497 (1988), 25 U.S.C. § 2701 et seq.

53 Carlson, Bringing Congress and Indians Back.

54 25 U.S.C. § 1323.

55 Kevin K. Washburn, “Federal Criminal Law and Tribal Self-Determination,” North Carolina Law Review 84, no. 4 (2006): 779–856.

56 Oliphant, 208–09.

57 18 U.S.C. § 1152; 18 U.S.C. § 1153.

58 18 U.S.C. § 1152; 18 U.S.C. § 1153.

59 Amnesty International, Maze of Injustice: The Failure to Protect Indigenous Women from Sexual Violence in the USA (2006), 28.

60 25 U.S.C. § 1301.

61 18 U.S.C. § 3598.

62 25 U.S.C. § 2801.

63 Indian Law and Order Commission, A Roadmap to Making Native America Safer: Report to the President and the Congress of the United States (Nov. 2013), xi, xiv, 11–15.

64 Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013, Pub. L. No. 113-4, 127 Stat. 54 (2013).

65 National Congress of American Indians, VAWA 2022: Special Tribal Criminal Jurisdiction. https://res.cloudinary.com/ncai/image/upload/v1649443190/Website%20General/STCJ-_Overview_xkgtef.pdf (extending recognition of inherent tribal criminal jurisdiction to child violence, sexual violence, stalking, sex trafficking, obstruction of justice, and assaults of tribal justice personnel). See also 25 U.S.C. § 1304.

66 Wilkins, Tribal State Affairs, 72.

67 McGirt v. Oklahoma, 140 S. Ct. 2452 (2020).

68 State ex rel. Matloff v. Wallace, 2021 OK CR 21, ¶15, 497 P. 3d 686, 689 (reaffirming recognition of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Reservations); Grayson v. State, 2021 OK CR 8, ¶10, 485 P. 3d 250, 254 (Seminole Reservation).

69 18 U.S.C. § 1152.

70 No. F-2017-1203 (Apr. 29, 2021).

71 Derrick James, “Oklahoma AG Wants People Released on McGirt Back in Custody,” Muskogee Phoenix, Jan. 20, 2022. https://www.muskogeephoenix.com/news/oklahoma-ag-wants-people-released-on-mcgirt-back-in-custody/article_51421619-03db-5a48-9f42-6de3cfc455da.html.

72 Castro-Huerta, 857.

73 Dahl, Decision-making in a Democracy.

74 Castro-Huerta, 857–58.

75 Ibid., 857.

76 Wilkins, Tribal State Affairs, 72.

77 Fletcher, Tribal Consent, 50.

78 Neither the federal nor state governments believed that tribal governments had been legally incorporated at this time. To date, tribal incorporation remains incomplete. Fletcher, Tribal Consent, 56.

79 25 U.S.C. §450a(a) (formerly § 450a(b)).

80 Carlson, Bringing Congress and Indians Back.

81 Carlson, Lobbying Against the Odds, 61–3.

82 Kirsten Matoy Carlson, “Beyond Descriptive Representation: American Indian Opposition to Federal Legislation,” The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics 7, no. 1 (2022): 74 (finding that Congress enacted less than 1% of federal bills related to Indians that American Indians uniformly testified against in the 97th, 100th, 103th, 106th, and 109th Congresses).

83 Ibid., 77 (finding that Congress amended 50% of the bills that Indian opponents sought to change to satisfy at least some of the concerns Indians raised).

84 Fletcher, Tribal Consent, 53.

85 Carlson, Beyond Descriptive Representation.

86 Ibid.

87 Philip P. Frickey, “(Native) American Exceptionalism in Federal Public Law,” Harvard Law Review 119 (2005): 483.

88 Frank R. Baumgartner, Jeffrey M. Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David C. Kimball, and Beth L. Leech, Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Kay Schlozman and John T. Tierney, Organized Interests and American Democracy (Harper Collins College Division, 1986).

89 Carlson, “Lobbying as a Strategy for Tribal Resilience,” Brigham Young University Law Review 2018, no. 6 (2018): 1198.

90 25 U.S.C. § 450a.

91 Carlson, Bringing Congress and Indians Back.

92 Feeley and Rubin, Judicial Policy Making, 11.

93 Castro-Huerta, 859.

94 William N. Eskridge, James J. Brudney, Joshua A. Chafetz, Philip P. Frickey, and Elizabeth Garrett, Cases and Materials on Legislation and Regulation (St. Paul, MN: West Academic Publishing, 2020).

95 Castro-Huerta, 861.

96 Ibid.

97 Ibid., 861–62.

98 Ibid.

99 Castro-Huerta, 862.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid., 862–63.

102 Ibid., 864.

103 Ibid.

104 Fletcher, Federal Indian Law, 342.

105 Duane Champagne and Carole Goldberg, Captured Justice: Native Nations and Public Law 280 (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2012).

106 Indian Law and Order Commission, A Roadmap for Making Native America Safer: Report to the President & Congress of the United States (November 2013).

107 Castro-Huerta, 866.

108 Fletcher, The Supreme Court and Congressional Policy; Getches, Beyond Indian Law; Philip P. Frickey, “Adjudication and its Discontents: Coherence and Conciliation in Federal Indian Law,” Harvard Law Review 110 (1997): 1754–84; Alex Tallchief Skibine, “The Supreme Court’s Last 30 Years of Federal Indian Law: Looking for Equilibrium or Supremacy?” Columbia Journal of Race and Law 8, no. 2 (2018): 277–344.

109 Matthew L.M. Fletcher, “Muskrat Textualism,” Northwestern University Law Review 116, no. 4 (2022): 963–1030; Ann Tweedy, “Has Federal Indian Law Finally Arrived at “the Far End of the Trail of Tears’?” Georgia State Law Review 37 (2020-2021): 739–88.

110 Lemieux, “The Counter-Majoritarian Difficulties of Hobbs”; Bowie, Antidemocracy; Klarman, The Degradation of American Democracy; Pamela S. Karlan, “The Supreme Court – Forward: Democracy and Disdain,” Harvard Law Review 126 (2012): 1–71.

111 Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, “Making the Supreme Court Safe for Democracy,” The New Republic, Oct. 13, 2020; Karlan, Democracy and Disdain.

112 Lemieux, “The Counter-Majoritarian Difficulties of Hobbs.”

113 Getches, Beyond Indian Law. Getches recognized these trends in his analysis of the Rehnquist Court. Decisions issued by the Roberts Court follow these trends as well.

114 Miriam Seifter, “Countermajoritarian Legislatures,” Columbia Law Review 121 (2021): 1733–99.

115 Dobbs.

116 Dobbs, 2257–9.

117 Goldberg and Champagne, Captured Justice; Joseph P. Kalt, Amy Besaw Medford, and Jonathan B. Taylor, “Economic and Social Impact of Restrictions on the Applicability of Federal Indian Policies to the Wabanaki Nations in Maine” (The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, December 2022).

118 John Dinan, “The U.S. Supreme Court and Federalism in the Twenty-first Century,” State and Local Government Review 49, no. 3 (2017): 215–28; Ilya Somin, “Federalism and the Roberts Court,” Publius 46, no. 3 (2016): 441–62.

119 Skibine, The Supreme Court’s Last 30 Years.

120 Dinan, Supreme Court and Federalism, 219.

121 Skibine, The Supreme Court’s Last 30 Years, 280; Getches, Beyond Indian Law, 329; Frickey, Adjudication and its Discontents; Bethany R. Berger, “Hope for Indian Tribes in the U.S. Supreme Court?: Menominee, Nebraska v. Parker, Bryant, Dollar General . . . and Beyond,” University of Illinois Law Review 5 (2017): 1912.

122 Berger, Hope for Indian Tribes, 1912–13; Fletcher, Muskrat Textualism.

123 Philip P. Frickey, “A Common Law for Our Age of Colonialism: The Judicial Divestiture of Indian Tribal Authority over Non-Members,” Yale Law Journal 109 (1999): 73–7; Skibine, The Supreme Court’s Last 30 Years, 285.

124 Getches, Beyond Indian Law; Khiara M. Bridges, “Race in the Roberts Court,” Harvard Law Review 136 (2022): 23–169.

125 Lee Epstein and Eric A. Posner, “The Roberts Court and the Transformation of Constitutional Protections for Religion: A Statistical Portrait,” Supreme Court Review (2022).

126 Berger, Hope for Indian Tribes, 1914–15.

127 Duro v. Reina, 495 U.S. 676 (1990).

128 Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, 435 U.S. 191 (1978); Duro v. Reina, 495 U.S. 676 (1990).

129 Fletcher, Muskrat Textualism, 981–2.

130 Carlson, Bringing Congress and Indians Back, 746.

131 Seth Davis, “Tribalism and Democracy,” William and Mary Law Review 62 (2020): 469.

132 Karlan, Democracy and Disdain.

133 Ibid.

134 Neal Devins and Lawrence Baum, “Split Definitive: How Party Polarization Turned the Supreme Court into a Partisan Court,” The Supreme Court Review (2016): 301–65.

135 Getches, Beyond Indian Law; Grant Christiansen, “Predicting Supreme Court Behavior in Indian Law Cases,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 26 (2020): 65–114; Bethany R. Berger, “Hope for Indian Tribes in the U.S. Supreme Court?: Menominee, Nebraska v. Parker, Bryant, Dollar General . . . and Beyond,” University of Illinois Law Review 5 (2017): 1901–46.

136 Xiao Wang, “Increasingly Antidemocratic? An Empirical Examination of the Supreme Court Nomination and Confirmation Process,” California Law Review Online 11 (2020-2021): 242–28; Epps and Sitaraman, Supreme Court Reform and American Democracy, 823.

137 Wang, Increasingly Antidemocratic, 243.

138 Ibid., 245.

139 Ibid.

140 Klarman, The Degregration of Democracy; Bowie, How the Supreme Court Dominates.

141 Lee Espstein, Jack Knight, and Andrew D. Martin, “The Supreme Court as a Strategic National Policymaker,” Emory Law Journal 50, no. 2 (2001): 595.

142 Adamany and Meinhold, Robert Dahl: Democracy.

143 Alex Tallchief Skibine, “The Supreme Court’s Last 30 Years of Federal Indian Law: Looking for Equilibrium or Supremacy?” Columbia Journal of Race and Law 8, no. 2 (2018): 277–344.

144 Skibine, The Supreme Court’s Last 30 Years, 330–33; Frickey, Adjudication and its Discontents.

145 Casper, The Supreme Court and National Policy; Ferejohn, Judicializing Politics, Politicizing Law.

146 Karlan, Democracy and Disdain.

147 Fletcher, The Supreme Court and Congressional Policy; Getches, Beyond Indian Law; Frickey, Adjudication and its Discontents; Skibine, The Supreme Court’s Last 30 Years.

148 Ely, Democracy and Distrust, 135–79.

149 Bowie, How the Supreme Court Dominates; Klarman, The Degradation of American Democracy.

150 Silverstein, Law’s Allure, 1–3.

151 Ferejohn, Judicializing Politics, Politicizing Law, 41–2.

152 Carlson, Lobbying Against the Odds; Kirsten Matoy Carlson, “Rethinking Legislative Advocacy,” Maryland Law Review 80 (2021): 960–1020.