Opinion ID: 221719
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: guthrie's counterclaim and third-party complaint

Text: Guthrie also challenges the district court's decision to dismiss, for procedural reasons, Guthrie's third-party complaint against the USDA and Guthrie's counterclaims asserted against Logan-1.
In its third-party complaint against the USDA, Guthrie sought declaratory and injunctive relief under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), 5 U.S.C. §§ 701-706. These claims are based generally on two theories: 1) Logan-1 did not have authority, under Oklahoma law, to agree to the § 1926(b) protection from competition because the protection was contrary to Okla. Const. art. 5, § 51. 2) But if Logan-1 did have state-law authority to agree to the § 1926(b) protection, then the USDA is now obligated to invoke the graduation clause in the 2003 loan agreement which, according to Guthrie, requires Logan-1 to repay that loan immediately. [7] The district court dismissed these claims on sovereign immunity grounds and for lack of standing. This court will review these decisions de novo. See Normandy Apartments, Ltd. v. U.S. Dep't of Housing & Urban Dev., 554 F.3d 1290, 1296 (10th Cir.2009) (sovereign immunity); Day v. Bond, 500 F.3d 1127, 1132 (10th Cir.2007) (standing).
Ordinarily, this court must resolve jurisdictional issues, such as sovereign immunity and standing, before addressing the merits of the claim, even if the [jurisdictional] question[s] [a]re difficult and we could easily decide the merits. Starkey ex rel. A.B. v. Boulder Cnty. Soc. Servs., 569 F.3d 1244, 1259 (10th Cir.2009); see also id. at 1259-60; Carolina Cas. Ins. Co. v. Pinnacol Assurance, 425 F.3d 921, 923-24, 927-28 (10th Cir.2005). But the Supreme Court, in Steel Co. v. Citizens for a Better Environment, 523 U.S. 83, 98-100, 118 S.Ct. 1003, 140 L.Ed.2d 210 (1998), recognized an exception to the general rule  that jurisdiction must be established before turning to the merits.... Occasionally a court may rule that a party loses on the merits without first establishing jurisdiction because the merits have already been decided in the court's resolution of a claim over which it did have jurisdiction. In that circumstance, resolution of the merits is `foreordained,' so the court is not producing an advisory opinion. Rather, it is merely parroting a prior decision. Such parroting is not an improper aggrandizement of power by the court. The court is not overreaching to decide an issue; after all, the issue has already been decided. Starkey, 569 F.3d at 1260 (citation omitted). That exception applies here to Guthrie's claims asserted against the USDA based upon the asserted conflict between § 1926(b) and the Oklahoma Constitution. The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in resolving our certified question raised by Logan-1's § 1926(b) claims against Guthrie, over which we clearly have jurisdiction, rejected the merits of that argument. The Oklahoma Supreme Court's decision also resolves the merits of Guthrie's third-party claims based on the same theory. We therefore need not address whether the United States has waived its sovereign immunity as to these claims, nor do we need to decide whether Guthrie has standing to assert them. Instead, we affirm the district court's dismissal of Guthrie's claims against the USDA which are based upon the alleged § 1926(b)/Oklahoma Constitution conflict, but we do so based on these claims' merit, or more precisely on their lack of merit. [8] We, therefore, remand these claims to the district court with instructions to dismiss them with prejudice. [9]
We must still address our jurisdiction to consider Guthrie's third-party claims against the USDA seeking to enforce the graduation clause in the 2003 loan agreement. We conclude that the United States has not waived its sovereign immunity as to these claims. Generally, the United States, through the APA, has waived its sovereign immunity to [a]n action in a court of the United States seeking relief other than money damages. 5 U.S.C. § 702 [10] ; see also Robbins v. U.S. Bureau of Land Mgmt., 438 F.3d 1074, 1080 (10th Cir.2006) (noting that 5 U.S.C. § 702 waives sovereign immunity in most suits for nonmonetary relief against the United States, its agencies, and its officers (quotation omitted)). Nevertheless, the APA limits this waiver of sovereign immunity in the last sentence of 5 U.S.C. § 702, which provides that the APA does not confer[] authority to grant relief if any other statute that grants consent to suit expressly or impliedly forbids the relief which is sought. See Kempthorne, 516 F.3d at 841 n. 4; Robbins, 438 F.3d at 1080. Thus, we must read the APA in conjunction with other jurisdictional statutes waiving sovereign immunity in order to determine whether those statutes forbid the relief sought in the case at hand. Robbins, 438 F.3d at 1080 (quotations omitted). In Robbins, this court considered the interaction of the APA with the federal Tucker and Little Tucker Acts. The Tucker Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1491, provides that [t]he United States Court of Federal Claims shall have jurisdiction to render judgment upon any claim against the United States founded ... upon any express or implied contract with the United States. Id. § 1491(a)(1). The Little Tucker Act, 28 U.S.C. § 1346(a)(2), grants federal district courts concurrent jurisdiction over contract claims against the government where plaintiffs seek no more than $10,000 in damages. The Supreme Court has long held that neither the Tucker Act nor the Little Tucker Act authorize relief other than money damages for such contract claims. Robbins, 438 F.3d at 1080-81 (footnote omitted). Reading the APA's waiver of sovereign immunity with the Tucker Acts' waiver, Robbins held that the Tucker and the Little Tucker Act, `impliedly forbid' federal courts from ordering declaratory or injunctive relief, at least in the form of specific performance, for contract claims against the government, and that the APA thus does not waive sovereign immunity for such claims. Id. at 1082 (footnote omitted); see also McKay v. United States, 516 F.3d 848, 851 (10th Cir.2008) (noting that, in the contract context, a distinct line of authority preserves the sovereign's immunity from being compelled to perform obligations it prefers to breach and compensate financially, holding that what are `in essence' claims for breach of contract cannot circumvent the Tucker Act and its prohibition on equitable relief by being artfully pled as something else). In this case, Guthrie's claims seeking the enforcement of the graduation clause in Logan-1's 2003 loan agreement with the USDA are claims seeking equitable relief in the nature of specific performance. [11] The United States has not waived its sovereign immunity as to such claims. Therefore, sovereign immunity bars these claims and we affirm the district court's dismissal of these claims without prejudice.
In summary, we affirm the dismissal of Guthrie's claims against the USDA alleging that Logan-1 had no authority under Oklahoma law to agree to 7 U.S.C. § 1926(b)'s protection from competition. But we do so based on the merits of those claims and so we remand them for the district court to dismiss those claims with prejudice. We further conclude that, because the United States has not waived its sovereign immunity, the district court properly dismissed without prejudice Guthrie's claims against the USDA seeking declaratory and injunctive relief based upon the graduation clause in the 2003 loan agreement.
Guthrie asserted counterclaims against Logan-1 based on the same two theories underlying its third-party complaint against the USDA  1) Logan-1's loan agreements with the USDA were void because Logan-1 lacked authority under state law to agree to the § 1926(b) protection from competition that was part of those loan agreements; and 2) the graduation clause in the 2003 loan agreement should be enforced, requiring Logan-1 to repay its indebtedness to the USDA. After dismissing Guthrie's third-party claims against the USDA based on the Government's sovereign immunity and Guthrie's lack of standing (an issue we need not address), the district court dismissed Guthrie's counterclaims against Logan-1, under Fed.R.Civ.P. 19, for failure to join an indispensable party  the USDA.