Indianz.Com > News > SCOTUSblog: Supreme Court delivers rebuke to state in Indian gaming case
Divided court rejects Texas’ bid to control gambling in tribal casinos
Monday, June 20, 2022
SCOTUSblog
Last Wednesday’s decision in Ysleta del Sur Pueblo v. Texas resolves a longstanding dispute about the ability of Texas to control gambling on the lands of two of the Native American tribes that reside there. The answer the court gave was a stern rebuke, vitiating the plenary control that lower-court decisions had granted the state for more than a quarter of a century.
The problem involves the odd history of two of the three Native American tribes that remain in the state of Texas, the petitioner Ysleta del Sur Pueblo (a tiny reservation near El Paso) and the much larger Alabama-Coushatta reservation in East Texas. Although almost all Native American tribes in the United States operate under a trust relationship with the federal government, those two tribes were in a trust relationship with Texas from 1968 to 1987. When Texas authorities decided that their state constitution did not permit that relationship, Congress restored a federal trust relationship for those tribes by passing the Restoration Act in 1987. The most controversial provisions of that statute, addressed in Ysleta, are the provisions that govern the tribes’ subjection to Texas gambling regulations.
The basic problem is how to reconcile one provision, which bars gambling activity “prohibited” by Texas law, with another provision, stating that the statute is not “a grant of civil or criminal regulatory jurisdiction to the State of Texas.” The lower courts quickly allowed Texas to act under those provisions to subject tribal operations to the full range of its regulations. In this case, for example, the state successfully challenged the operation of bingo by the Pueblo that does not follow the details of Texas’ regulations on that subject. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion for the court squarely rejects that understanding.
Indianz.Com
This article was originally published on SCOTUSblog, the Supreme Court of the United States Blog, on June 16, 2022. It is republished here under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US).
Recommended Citation: Ronald Mann, Divided court rejects Texas’ bid to control gambling in tribal casinos, SCOTUSblog (Jun. 16, 2022, 10:45 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/06/divided-court-rejects-texas-bid-to-control-gambling-in-tribal-casinos/
U.S. Supreme Court Decision: Ysleta del Sur Pueblo v. Texas
Syllabus |
Opinion [Gorsuch] |
Dissent [Roberts]
U.S. Supreme Court Documents: Ysleta del Sur Pueblo v. Texas
Question Presented |
Docket Sheet: No. 20-7622 |
Oral Argument Transcript
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