Opinion ID: 2806515
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Teaching of Bay Mills

Text: Indeed, Bay Mills clearly illustrates the Court’s steadfast deference to Congress’s plenary and exclusive role in defining tribal sovereignty: “Although Congress has plenary authority over tribes, courts will not lightly assume that Congress intends to undermine Indian selfgovernment.” Bay Mills, 134 S. Ct. at 2031–32. The Court enforced the “enduring principle of Indian law” requiring that Congress “unequivocally express” its intent to limit tribal sovereignty. Id. Thus, where Congress had expressly abrogated tribal immunity from suit for illegal gaming on Indian lands, the Court refused to expand the abrogation to allow suit for illegal gaming outside Indian country, even though the resulting anomaly was arguably nonsensical. Id. at 2033–34. The Court reasoned that “Congress should make the call whether to curtail a tribe’s immunity for off-reservation commercial conduct—and the Court should accept Congress’s judgment.” Id. at 2038. No. 14-2239 NLRB v. Little River Band of Ottawa Indians Tribal Govʼt Page 35 Moreover, the Court expressly declined to draw the distinction, here urged by the Board as well, between actions of tribal self-governance and commercial activities of the tribe. The court gave one “simple reason: because it is fundamentally Congress’s job, not ours.” Id. at 2037. Congress, the Court observed, “has the greater capacity to weigh and accommodate the competing policy concerns.” Id. at 2037–38 (internal quotation marks omitted). Bay Mills is not controlling, but it highlights the incorrectness of the majority’s analysis. A couple of particular examples further illustrate the point. One sentence that typifies the majority’s opinion reads as follows: “The tribes’ retained sovereignty reaches only that power needed to control internal relations, preserve their own unique customs and social order, and prescribe and enforce rules of conduct for their own members.” Majority Op. at 16 (internal alterations omitted). The statement simply cannot be reconciled with Bay Mills, for we know that a tribe’s sovereignty encompasses all historic “core aspects” of its sovereignty—more than just controlling internal relations (and including immunity from suit). Bay Mills, 134 S. Ct. at 2030; see also Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma v. Mfg. Technologies, Inc., 523 U.S. 751, 758 (1998) (“[T]ribal [sovereignty] extends beyond what is needed to safeguard tribal self-governance.”). Or consider another sentence from the majority opinion: “[W]hen a tribal government goes beyond matters of internal self-governance and enters into an off-reservation business transaction with non-Indians, its claim of sovereignty is at its weakest.” Majority Op. at 8–9 (internal citations omitted). But such a transaction in Bay Mills did not weaken the tribe’s sovereignty whatsoever; the Supreme Court required a clear congressional statement to abrogate the tribe’s immunity. The majority opinion reads as if Bay Mills doesn’t exist. It relies on Montana as “chart[ing] the contemporary law of implicit divestiture of inherent tribal sovereignty.” Id. at 9 (emphasis added). Yet, as explained above, Montana is not a divestiture case at all; Bay Mills is. And in the debate between the justices in Bay Mills, thirty-three years after Montana, we find a truly contemporary clarification of Indian sovereignty. The dissent in Bay Mills would have applied a “modest scope of tribal sovereignty . . . limited only to ‘what is necessary to protect tribal self-government or to control internal relations.’” Bay Mills, 134 S. Ct. at 2048 (Thomas, J., dissenting) (quoting Montana, 450 U.S. at 564). That sounds like the majority opinion. But No. 14-2239 NLRB v. Little River Band of Ottawa Indians Tribal Govʼt Page 36 the Court rejected that modest scope of tribal sovereignty in favor of a more robust one. Bay Mills, 134 S. Ct. at 2031–32. Even though neither the Court nor any party “suggested that immunity from the isolated suits that may arise out of extraterritorial commercial dealings is somehow fundamental to protecting tribal government or regulating a tribe’s internal affairs,” id. at 2048 (Thomas, J., dissenting), the Court upheld the tribe’s sovereignty. In sum, the majority’s sympathy for the Board’s assertion of jurisdiction in this case not only finds precious little support in, but is affirmatively undercut by, the Supreme Court’s most recent pronouncements on Indian sovereignty.