Court: Tribes Can't Expand Holdings

[Rose Siding]

WASHINGTON -- Indian tribes can't expand their tax-exempt holdings by buying up property that has been outside their reservations for generations, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

The 8-1 decision found that New York's Oneida Indian Nation may not upend 190 years of local development and regulation by reverting recently acquired land to tax-exempt status.
....
"The Oneidas long ago relinquished the reins of government and cannot regain them through open-market purchases from current titleholders," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote in the ruling, which overturned an appeals court decision in favor of the Oneidas.

Justice John Paul Stevens was the lone dissenter. He argued the decision "is at war with at least two bedrock principles of Indian law: "that only Congress can reduce a tribe's reservation and change a reservation's tax status."

He also chided fellow jurists for worrying too much about the possible implications of allowing tribes to expand reservations by reacquiring historic land.

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-scotus-indian-land-taxes,0,4624821.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

[ender]

1. the tribe was destroying the tax base...

it was an all out attack on the people of oneida.

[Trillo]

2. Interesting.

"Tribes can't expand holdings."

Isn't that what happened when the land was sold to non-Indian entities?

[KittyWampus]

3. What About Churches Buying Proprerty?

[Xithras]

4. Pathetic

Our ancestors come in, militarily destroy them, take their land, and impose a social and economic system on them that kept them down. When they failed to succeed, later generations said it was their failure to accept modernity and work within the system. When they modernize, work within the system, and use American capitalistic principles to reaquire the land that was taken from them by force, we smack them down because... well, because... Dammit, there just isn't any good reason other than: "We can't let these uppity brown people think that they can have a nation again". This is shameful.

[XemaSab]

5. Tsk

"The Oneidas long ago relinquished the reins of government and cannot regain them through open-market purchases from current titleholders," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg wrote in the ruling, which overturned an appeals court decision in favor of the Oneidas.

Yeah, "relinquished." This sounds just like "she was asking for it." Blame the victim.