Posted on 07/09/2020 8:51:10 AM PDT by Enlightened1
The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a huge swath of the state of Oklahoma is Native American land for certain purposes, siding with a Native American man who had challenged his rape conviction by state authorities in the territory.
The 5-4 decision, with an opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, endorsed the claim of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation to the land, which encompasses three million acres, including most of the city of Tulsa.
The decision means that only federal authorities, no longer state prosecutor, can lodge charges against Native Americans who commit serious alleged crimes on that land, which is home to 1.8 million people. Of those people, 15% or fewer are Native Americans.
“Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law,” Gorsuch wrote.
“Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word,” he wrote.
The case hinged on application of the Major Crimes Act, which gives federal authorities, rather than state prosecutors, jurisdiction over crimes committed by or against Native Americans in Native American territory.
“For MCA purposes, land reserved for the Creek Nation since the 19th century remains ‘Indian country,’ ” Gorsuch wrote in the opinion.
The conservative justice Gorsuch was joined in the majority by the court’s four liberal justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Chief Justice John Roberts dissented from the ruling, as did his fellow conservatives, Clarence Thoma,s Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh.
In his dissent, Roberts warned that “across this vast area” now deemed to be Native American land, “the State’s ability to prosecute serious crimes will be hobbled and decades of past convictions could well be thrown out.”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
The breaking apart of America!!!
LOL.... yep
Jimmy McGirt, who was convicted by an Oklahoma court of raping a four-year-old child.
Good thing he did not do anything serious. </sacr)
I have a quarter section in SE oklahoma (highlighted in RED there). Cattle, barns, house etc. and we spend about half our retirement there. Quarter next to us is owned by Choctaw. They do nothing at all with it. Zero. Life goes on.
I suspect this individual will be handed over from the State Department of Corrections to the Feds.
We took their slaves. Indians never agreed to 13th Amendment. Oklahoma statehood is invalid.
Roberts is convincing. Starts page 46, runs for 37 pages.
Nice to have a spot of planet Earth to call your own!
But meh, if Gorsuch cared a whit about “originalism” he wouldn’t have published his fantasy that the authors of the 1964 civil rights act had bearded men in dresses and two dudes having anal sex in mind when they wrote the law.
Gorsuch is in the vanguard here. This is the future of the GOP: support for Leftist decisions/polices constructed with right leaning “logic.” It’s very similar to how the left took over our other institutions. Churches in particular.
Her is a link to maps of early Oklahoma, some maps I spent 40 years looking for I found here.
http://dougdawg.blogspot.com/2010/10/maps-and-history-of-oklahoma-county.html
Economy of Explanation is one of The Tests Of Truth.
37 pages isn’t Economy of Explanation.
Overwhelming amount of evidence.
It doesn’t meet The Test Of Truth.
I won’t be surprised if 10 years from now land that was “stolen” from the Native Americans is taken back, without compensation, and given to their descendents.
and all the Debt that goes with it ?
Has Property Values fallen yet ?
Just looked this up Never heard of it. I’m going to order it.
You could make an even more clear-cut case that "Hawaiian statehood is invalid" if you wanted to look at what happened at the time the Hawaiian islands shifted to U.S. control. Hell, I think even the President at the time (McKinley?) said it was an illegal coup by the U.S. military and a federal "investigation" declared the U.S. basically overthrew the duly chosen Hawaiian monarch. They ordered the military to cease and deist, which of course was ignored.
It would be hilarious if someone brought federal suit (petition on behalf of the modern day descendants of the Hawaiian royal family) and the Supreme Court ruled in their favor and declared the United States has no sovereignty over the Kingdom of Hawaii, telling all the RAT Senators and Congressmen that their title no longer exists and they should go home.
>> Roberts is convincing. Starts page 46, runs for 37 pages. <<
Huh? I guess I will have to read the entire 37 page argument, I'm now confused. FReepers scream bloody murder at Roberts and howl about Bush appointing him, but Roberts voted with the three other conservatives on this one and OPPOSED putting vast areas of Oklahoma under Indian rule. GORSUCH was the one saying the U.S. government had no jurisdiction over those areas and voted with the four Marxist judges that Indian reservations were the supreme authority there.
How this all works out is a interesting theoretical logistic question, which I suppose will now have to be implemented in real life. The article says "nearly all" of Tulsa. So SOME isolated parts of the city are still under U.S. rule? How does that even work? It reminds me of the kooky proposals to dice up Jerusalem and make parts of "east Jerusalem" the capitol of a future "Palestinian state", nevermind the fact that there are Muslim neighborhoods and residents in the "Jewish region" of Jerusalem, and vice versa.
Doing a brief google search, Tulsa is Oklahoma's second largest city with nearly 400,000 people, and the latest demographics state that 5.3% of the city is American indian. I can't imagine the remaining 95% of the residents will be too please to learn they are now under the rule of the Muscogee Nation.
Irritating 90s pop band Hanson is from Tulsa, they can play "Hail to the Chief" to this guy:
https://www.mcn-nsn.gov/government/executive-branch/
Also, I remember reading a while back that most Indian tribes in the mainland U.S. refuse to legalize or recognize gay marriage. I wonder if there's a chance of a "silver lining" there. ;-)
If it didn't happen so often.
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