Opinion ID: 111468
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Administrative Construction

Text: The Court explains, however, that the uniform contemporaneous view of executive officials commands  `very great respect.'  Ante, at 254. Even if this were an appropriate case to defer to a consistent administrative construction, [36] the checkered history of the Department of the Interior's construction of § 17 demonstrates that the Court's purported deference is wholly unwarranted. We have recognized previously that the weight of an administrative interpretation will depend, among other things, upon `its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements' of an agency. Morton v. Ruiz, 415 U. S. 199, 237 (1974), quoting Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U. S. 134, 140 (1944). See also FEC v. Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, 454 U. S. 27, 38-39 (1981); United States v. National Assn. of Securities Dealers, Inc., 422 U. S. 694, 718-719 (1975). The record demonstrates that the Department's construction of § 17 has swung wildly back and forth over the past 60 years. For the first two years after the Pueblo Lands Act was enacted, the Secretary routinely applied the general right-of-way statutes to the Pueblo, as he had prior to the Act. [37] Among the numerous rights-of-way granted pursuant to these restrictive provisions were 50-year easements to the petitioner Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company. [38] Never was there even a hint that § 17 might have worked any change in the law or in the narrow exceptions to Congress' policy against alienation. In 1926, however, a new Special Assistant to the Attorney General, George A. H. Fraser, concluded that the existing right-of-way statutes probably did not cover the Pueblos: It is not quite certain that [the statutes do] not include them, but it looks as though [they] did not. [39] Moreover, Fraser concluded that the first clause of § 17  prohibiting any alienation except as may hereafter be provided by Congress  meant literally that no transfer of any interest in Pueblo land could occur until Congress acted at some undetermined point in the future. [40] Fraser accordingly began filing trespass suits pursuant to the Pueblo Lands Act against railroad companies and utilities that had rights-of-way across Pueblo lands. [41] These companies, obviously, were not anxious to submit to extended litigation. A representative of one of them stated that it was essential to find a method to get easements and rights-of-way railroaded thru the federal bureaucracy with a minimum of delay. [42] The record clearly shows that the construction of § 17 to permit Pueblo alienation was developed, not by a Government official, but by an attorney for a Chicago bond house underwriting one of the railroads. [43] Attorneys with the Office of Indian Affairs believed this new interpretation was doubtful and inconsistent with the underlying premises of the Pueblo Lands Act. [44] Fraser himself thought it was inconsistent to authorize the Pueblos to convey, even subject to an approval, which must usually be based on the recommendation of some local official who may or may not be fully informed and disinterested. [45] Nevertheless, Fraser recommended and obtained the Secretary's approval of this approach on the theory that the general good would be served by acquiescing rather than by urging the doubts suggested by Sec. 17. [46] Agency officials, however, continued to believe the interpretation was doubtful. [47] From 1926 until 1933, 55 rights-of-way were obtained by this method. [48] Many of the grantees would otherwise have been forced to defend quiet title suits under the Pueblo Lands Act. By acquiring deeds directly from the Pueblos, they were able either to avoid litigation or to be dismissed out as defendants, as was the petitioner in this case. [49] Fraser described this method as the cheapest and easiest way of getting rid of controversies involving Pueblo lands. [50] There usually was no difficulty . . . at all in persuading the Pueblos to sign such deeds; [51] a carload of lumber was sometimes thrown in to sweeten the deal. [52] As the Solicitor for the Department of the Interior recently observed, this construction of § 17 frequently resulted in the outright avoidance of clearly applicable statutes that would have provided far greater procedural and financial protection to the Pueblos than a process that involved the mere approval of an existing agreement negotiated by a tribe. [53] Cf. United States v. Locke, 471 U. S. 84, 124, n. 12 (1985) (STEVENS, J., dissenting) (criticizing the Department of the Interior's use of every technical construction of an ambiguous statute to enable the suck[ing] up of property much as a vacuum cleaner, if not watched closely, will suck up jewelry or loose money). Section 17 was used only sporadically from the 1920's to the 1950's. From 1926 to 1933 there were 55 approvals pursuant to its terms; from 1936 to 1944 there were 13; from 1953 to 1959 there were 11. [54] Section 17 has never been used since 1959 to authorize any Pueblo conveyance. [55] On the other hand, since the 1920's at least 779 rights-of-way over Pueblo lands have been obtained pursuant to the generally applicable right-of-way statutes and in accordance with the strict safeguards contained therein. [56] In the 1940's, the Solicitor for the Department of the Interior concluded that § 17 did not authorize the acquisition of rights-of-way and that any such acquisitions must be made pursuant to the general statutes. [57] Nevertheless, § 17 occasionally was invoked thereafter where a small amount of acreage [was] involved and in order to avoid considerable work for . . . the agency. [58] Consistent with the views of the Department in recent generations, the Department's Solicitor concluded last year that Congress did not intend Section 17 to be construed as authorizing the alienation of Pueblo lands, that the contrary view was irrational, and that the courts in this case had been correct to disregard the Department's [earlier] interpretation of that section. [59] And as the Government has emphasized before this Court, the earlier administrative construction  such as it was  applied only to rights-of-way except for one or two isolated incidents, and therefore cannot reasonably support an interpretation of § 17 that would generally authorize outright alienation of Pueblo lands. [60] The Court's notion of deference to agency expertise in an Indian case, then, appears to go something like this: where a proffered construction of a statute was not followed for two years but was then advocated by private attorneys and acquiesce[d] in by the Government as a matter of convenience; where that construction was then used to avoid the fiduciary safeguards of other legislation but withered away after a decade or two; where the construction was followed in less than 10% of the cases to which it could have been applied; where the construction was rejected by the agency more than 40 years ago and branded irrational by the agency's top legal officer just last year; and where the Government has urged that the construction be given a narrow compass at most, this Court as a matter of deference to such a uniform construction will adopt the most extreme version of that construction as the law of the land. [61]