- Rumors are that Gorsuch is looking at the text of the “Manhattan Transfer” agreement
- Even goofier is that somehow Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan are now textualists ala Gorsuch
- Of course they are not, they just agreed on a result
- So either speeding infractions must now be made a federal offense or the 1/32nd + are immune
- Hopefully the tribes themselves will produce more sense than Gorsuch et al offered
“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.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-tempting-of-neil-gorsuch-11594422279
Is Trump Looking In All the Wrong Places for Conservative Justices?
Gorsuch sure getting dressier
It Appears the President Has Gone to ‘Kookville’ to find nominees for the Supreme Court
It seems to us, Justice Gorsuch, siding with all four liberals on the Court, has handed a large part of Oklahoma over to the “Creek Indian Nation” (When they start collecting real estate taxes from the people of Tulsa, the Creeks are going to be ‘rolling in Wampum’!)
The Wall Street Journal reported in an editorial that a man convicted in 1997 by the state of Oklahoma for rape and sodomy of his 4 year old granddaughter-in-law appealed his conviction. Jimmy McGirt claimed that he ‘committed the crime on land Congress reserved as a permanent home for the Creek Nation’. And, as a member of the Seminole Nation he therefore claimed that “any Indian who commits certain crimes within the ‘Indian country’ must be tried in federal courts.”
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.
The Journal writes, “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.”
Writing in the dissent, Chief Justice Roberts noted that, “In the century before the 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.”
Justice Gorsuch swept aside that point and other precedents and reliance interests because “Congress has never expressly written a single law that disestablished the reservation.”
“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.”
According to the Journal, ” 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.”
Though we’ve not been confirmed to the High Court, we’d be inclined to agree.
Justice Gorsuch is starting to look like another court mistake by a Republican president.
Oh well, that’s become a standard. dlh
