The rightwing supreme court has another target: Native American rights
In 1886, the supreme court in United States v Kagama described states as the deadliest enemies of Native nations. The case concerned criminal jurisdiction on Indian reservations, but it also recognized the role states, and their citizens, played in fueling Native conflict and dispossession. It was a rare occasion in which the court acknowledged it was making Indian law in the context of great violence and suffering.
Paradoxically, the court found that the very nation that waged wars of extermination and invasion against Native people also declared itself their sole guardian, protecting its wards from the local ill feeling of land-hungry whites flooding Native lands in the western states. And where the US constitution was lacking in language defining federal authority over Native nations, the court had invented it, for better or for worse.
Thats why the court affirmed in Kagama, like it has for nearly two centuries, that Indian country sat apart from states and was instead subject to congressional and federal authority. Put simply, states had no business in tribal affairs.
That decision and others like it however imperfect and drenched in conquest they were supposedly shielded Native people and their reservations from the arbitrary authority of states and hostile white settlers.
Last month, the supreme court tore up that decision and centuries of legal precedent with it. The 5-4 decision in Oklahoma v Castro-Huerta found that state governments have the right to prosecute non-Natives for crimes committed against tribal members on reservation lands. The decision weakens the effects of McGirt v Oklahoma, which found that most of eastern Oklahoma was still legally Indian Country, where many crimes were beyond the grasp of state law. But the court applied Castro-Huerta far beyond Oklahoma.
A state has jurisdiction over all of its territory, including Indian country, Brett Kavanaugh wrote, resting his argument on a false 10th amendment claim, which doesnt authorize states to intervene in tribal affairs.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/21/supreme-court-native-american-rights-target
wnylib
(21,428 posts)He does not recognize rights for anyone, except his own right to be free of scrutiny and protected from "dangerous" people who protest his ignorant opinions.
2naSalit
(86,534 posts)Nobody is safe from these assholes. We may need to resort to some pretty drastic measures at some point. I don't know what those would be but we are going to need to contain them somehow for the good of all life on the planet.
Mosby
(16,299 posts)In AZ the governor's signed gambling contracts with NA tribes, they were not legal, and yet now we have 13 Indian casinos ringing the valley. In one case the TO told the Glendale mayor they weren't buying land for a casino, but then they did.
Unless you want to carve out parts of the US, the rezs are part of our country. They don't have, nor should they have, complete sovereignty.
Haggis 4 Breakfast
(1,453 posts)when people who are rated "NOT QUALIFIED" by the ABA are put on the Court, by a president who doesn't care.
when people who get more/majority of "blue slips" from Senators, stating that they have serious objections to or will not support a judge and these concerns are overlooked or completely disregarded, as Bitch McConnell did.
Let's not forget that the FBI got 4,500 calls on the tip line reporting concerns with Schlitz Kavanaugh. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. OF. THEM. WERE. IGNORED.
That Kavanaugh could write his opinion of a false interpretation and NOBODY - not even the clerks or aids - corrected him tells us everything we need to know about the future legitimacy of this court.
orthoclad
(2,910 posts)until we fix this corrupted court. Before the midterms, they'll allow Republican state legislatures to throw out the popular vote and hand out seats to whoever they want.
Impeach. Investigate. Expand.