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violetfaust · a day ago

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In the last two weeks alone, Trump's Supreme Court has:

Overturned Roe v. Wade.

Severely limited Miranda protections by ruling that citizens can't sue the cops who don't read them their Constitutional rights.

Expanded gun rights less than two months after schoolchildren were slaughtered and weeks after a racist shooting in a community supermarket, by striking down sensible New York gun control laws.

And now eviscerated the power of the EPA to do its job and try to protect against climate change by ruling it can't regulate emissions from power plants.

These "justices" are not only legislating from the bench and making decisions that are stripping human rights and WILL CAUSE DEATHS in opposition to decades of precedent (50 years for Roe, 60 for Miranda, 110 for the NY gun laws):

Many of them are unfit to serve.

Clarence Thomas's wife is an insurrectionist and election denier who is refusing to cooperate with the January 6 committee. Thomas has also not recused himself from decisions regarding the January 6 committee. He is married to a literal traitor to this country and has blatant conflict of interest. He MUST resign or be impeached and removed.

Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the bench was rammed through the Senate despite credible accusations that he is a rapist (as well as possibly guilty of financial misconduct or crimes). Investigators refused to consider evidence. This investigation must be reopened, and if more evidence is presented (as I suspect it will be), he should be impeached, removed, and prosecuted.

Neil Gorsuch perjured himself in his Senate confirmation hearings about Roe. He said he recognized and respected it as the law of the land, yet last week he cosigned Alito's reactionary brief that claimed not only that Roe was not law, but that it never had been. Thus Gorsuch should be impeached, removed, and if possible prosecuted for lying under oath.

While I don't know of evidence that Amy Coney Barrett is legally unfit to serve (despite being a far-right-wing reactionary), her appointment was illegitimate under the Republicans' own arbitrary rules: they refused to even consider Obama's candidate for the Court after Scalia's death because it was "in an election year" although that was MARCH, then forced through Barrett's a WEEK before the election (and less than a month after RBG's death). Senate Republicans need to acknowledge that either her appointment or Gorsuch's was illegitimate (and McConnell should be censured for it).

#scotus #us politics #roe v wade #gun sanity now #clarence thomas #brett kavanaugh #neil gorsuch #continuing trumpocalypse #stack the court #i'm so fucking angry #also alito should be investigated for ties to the far right because he's a nutjob and i'm sure they're there but that's another post #sorry for going off #i wanna post fandom stuff but this is INSANE #op

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dontmean2bepoliticalbut · a day ago

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kurtneystink · 2 days ago

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URGENT (RIOT GRRRL SUMMER)

WEAR BLACK ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, WEAR BLACK ON THE FOURTH OF JULY!!!

the fourth of july celebrates freedom in american citizens. this year, it's just simply untrue. women in america don't have complete control over their bodies. there are literal 13 year olds and young teens having to carry babies because their state does not allow abortion, the extermination of a clump of cells in their uterus. there are also a lot of women that are going to die because of this new law, due to unsafe abortion.

in conclusion, instead of wearing the american flag colors, please wear black on the fourth of july.

repost this, screenshot this, add it on different platforms that are not just tumblr (insta, snap, tiktok). have a good day and keep protesting <3

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phabtacular · 2 days ago

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[Image ID: A screencap of text on a pink background. It reads: “SPENDING FREEZE for women’s rights. July 3rd-5th. Women direct 83% of all consumption in the United States, in buying power and influence. To protest the recent overturn of Roe v. Wade, boycott all spendatures July 3rd-5th. This means spending ZERO dollars. Women are also encouraged to stay home from work July 5th. A day without women. NO BUY JULY.” End of description.]

A friend spotted this on Reddit.

Regardless of your gender, if you’re pro-choice I hope you can participate to an extent and/or spread the word 🇺🇸

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contemplatingoutlander · 2 days ago

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It appears that Fox News viewers aren’t only the “victims” of Fox News’ right-wing propaganda; they’re also the “drivers” of Fox News’ right-wing propaganda.

Fox News Channel is airing the Jan. 6 committee hearings when they occur in daytime hours and a striking number of the network’s viewers have made clear they’d rather be doing something else.

During two daytime hearings last week, Fox averaged 727,000 viewers, the Nielsen company said. That compares to the 3.09 million who watched the hearings on MSNBC and the 2.21 million tuned in to CNN.

It completely flips the typical viewing pattern for the news networks. During weekdays...Fox News Channel routinely has more viewers than the other two networks combined, Nielsen said.

Last Thursday, Fox had 1.33 million viewers for the 2 p.m. Eastern hour before the hearing started [...]

After the hearing started, Fox’s audience’s sank to 747,000 for the 3 p.m. Eastern hour and even lower, to 718,000, at 4 p.m. Fox cut away from the hearing at 5 p.m. to show its popular panel program, “The Five,” and fans immediately rewarded them: viewership shot up to 2.76 million people, Nielsen said.

The apparent lack of interest explains why the frequently Trump-friendly network stuck with its regular lineup during the committee’s only prime-time hearing, while ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC all showed the Washington proceedings.

[emphasis added]

So we now see that many Fox News viewers choose to keep themselves in the right-wing echo chamber. When Fox deviates from the echo chamber, they tune out.

Fox News has learned that if it wants to keep its audience, it has to pander to the beliefs of the right-wing alternate reality that their audience wants to live in.

It’s a vicious (and terrifying) mutually-reinforcing cycle of ignorance, disinformation, hate, and bigotry.

#fox news #jan 6 committee #jan 6 #trump #us politics #right-wing propaganda #huffpost

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 2 days ago

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Justice Stephen Breyer has notified the White House that his retirement will be effective Thursday, June 30, at noon ET.

In a letter to President Joe Biden, Breyer said it had been his "great honor" to participate as a Judge in the "effort to maintain our Constitution and the Rule of Law."

He said that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is prepared to "take the prescribed oaths" to begin her service as the 116th member of the court.

The fact that the court will issue final opinions and orders on the same day reflects a more expedited timeline than past terms. It suggests that the justices -- who have been subject to death threats since the release of a draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade are eager for the momentous and divisive term to end as soon as possible.

There are two big cases awaiting resolution concerning the environment and immigration.

Breyer, who was appointed to the court in 1994 by then-President Bill Clinton, announced his retirement plans in January. The highly anticipated decision was met with a collective sigh of relief by Democrats, who feared the possibility of losing the seat to a future Republican President should the 83-year-old jurist ignore an intense pressure campaign from the left, which urged him to leave the court while Biden had a clear path to replace him.

A consistent liberal vote on the Supreme Court with an unflappable belief in the US system of government and a pragmatic view of the law, Breyer has sought to focus the law on how it could work for the average citizen. He was no firebrand and was quick to say that the Supreme Court couldn't solve all of society's problems. He often stressed that the court shouldn't be seen as part of the political branches but recognized that certain opinions could be unpopular.

In his later years on the court, he was best known for a dissent he wrote in 2015 in a case concerning execution by lethal injection. He took the opportunity to write separately and suggest to the court that it take up the constitutionality of the death penalty.

In the opinion, Breyer wrote that after spending many years on the court reviewing countless death penalty cases, he had come to question whether innocent people had been executed. He also feared that the penalty was being applied arbitrarily across the country. He noted that, in some cases, death row inmates could spend years -- sometimes in solitary confinement -- waiting for their executions.

Jackson, Breyer's replacement, was confirmed by the Senate in April by a vote of 53-47, with three Republicans joining Democrats to vote in favor. Though her addition to the bench doesn't change the ideological balance of the court, Jackson will be the first Black woman to serve on the highest court in the nation.

#us politics #news #justice stephen breyer #justice ketanji brown jackson #us supreme court #scotus #biden administration #president joe biden #2022 #roe v. wade #president bill clinton #cnn #death penalty

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vitariesocks · 3 hours ago

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cis lgb Americans keep saying “they’re coming for us next!!” in regards to the current political climate as if the republicans didn’t introduce over 300 anti-trans bills this past legislative session, many of which passed, including the forcible detransitioning of all trans youth in alabama. like huh?? you are not good trans allies.

the current political climate is possible because republicans made trans people a “wedge issue” and cis people haven’t been fighting with us for the last 5 years while states decimate trans rights

#slamming my head against the wall #have been appearing at the MO state capital for the last 3 years to testify against these bills #cis ppl: crickets #lgbtq #us politics #trans

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sunlightslastglimmer · 10 hours ago

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Hope is a practice. Part of how I am trying to cultivate it in myself is remembering that the majority of my fellow citizens see things with justice and compassion in mind. Gun control, access to abortion, healthcare and reproductive justice is overwhelmingly the popular opinion.

That's why the Republican and right-wing activists are acting to undermine elections, decrease citizen participation, and demoralize us. They KNOW they are losing the battle for hearts and minds. They have to turn to cheating, lying, distraction and violence.

Please don't give up. We know in our hearts what a better world can be, and you are part of that. We can do it if we all reach out together and take it.

#us politics #abortion #elections #supreme court

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queenhelenblackthorn · a day ago

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Our Supreme Court overlords basically killed the EPA and gutted the Clean Air Act. So not only will they force you to have a baby, they will force you to have a baby in the apocalypse.

#scotus #roe v wade #epa v west virginia #us politics #climate change

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icecoldham · a day ago

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The recent US Supreme Court decision on prosecution of non-indigenous people on indigenous land represents a major act of colonial encroachment by the US Government, one which seriously threatens indigenous sovereignty and safety, not only in Oklahoma but in all 50 states. Brett Kavanaugh himself effectively spelled out the true aim of the decision:

"[As] a matter of sovereignty, a State has jurisdiction over all of its territory, including Indian country."

In other words, the decision effectively stakes a claim on all remaining indigenous territories as being under state jurisdiction, a serious departure from legal precedent and a direct challenge to the self determination of indigenous peoples in the United States. It is nothing short of an act of colonial assimilation, designed to subjugate indigenous peoples and destroy their nationhood.

It is extremely likely that state governments will use this new precedent to assert their authority in the name of "stopping crime". But the terrifying reality is that the "justice" of settler colonial states like the US has always been used against indigenous people as a tool of genocide.

One of the immediate consequence of this decision is that states will be able to shield settlers from being prosecuted by indigenous officials for crimes committed on their land, effectively decapitating the indigenous courts and establishing a policy of settler extraterritoriality.

This is a major setback for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls movement in particular, which rightfully has grievances against state justice officials, not only for failing to deliver results on countless indigenous deaths, but for actively obstructing the investigation of and participating in what amounts to an act of state endorsed genocide.

All of this is to say that it is essential that all feminists, leftists, and anti-racist allies out there should be boosting this right now. This needs to become a topic of international conversation, and must be condemned in the strictest terms or we will soon see further encroachment by other states, in particular Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Israel among other settler-colonial regimes. Our struggle first and foremost MUST serve the interests of the most marginalized people in our society, and right now indigenous voices NEED to be uplifted more than ever.

I made this post to remind people not to get tunnel vision in light of the recent overturning of Roe vs Wade. While the restoration of abortion rights and bodily autonomy as a legal institution are paramount, the safety of indigenous people from state and settler violence, especially women, girls, and the 2SLGBTQ+ community means just as much, and this ruling puts them in serious danger.

Any one fight is not more important than all the others. Our struggle must be fundamentally anti-colonial, anti-cisheteropatriarchal, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and anti-capitalist in its aims, or we are neglecting key aspects of the fight. Never lose sight of the fact that the encroachment of fascism in recent years is a war being waged across all fronts. Whatever our identity, whatever our struggle, we are all in the very same battle. The only way that we can triumph against an enemy so hegemonic is by recognizing the intersectional nature of the conflict and acting accordingly by standing in solidarity with one another.

#socialism #feminism #us politics #intersectional feminism #anti capitalism #pro choice #roe vs. wade #solidarity #anti racism #anti fascism #anti colonialism #anti imperialism #tw genocide #roe vs wade #indigenous rights #not indigenous #land back

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dontmean2bepoliticalbut · a day ago

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#us politics #abortions #abortion bans #roe v. wade #dobbs v. jackson women’s health organization #planned parenthood v. casey #us supreme court #scotus #trigger laws #reproductive rights #reproductive health #abortion is a human right #abortion is health care

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cryoverkiltmilk · 9 hours ago

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A thread on the Republican agenda, and the ongoing messaging problem surrounding it. (1/3)

#politics #us politics #republicans #republican party #white supermacists #white supremacy #white male supremacy #white male supremacists

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wowbright · 12 hours ago

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Since I'm seeing anti-voting posts on my dash again, and Tumblr is even *recommending* them to me, let's be clear about this--

Voting is one of the most basic tools for participating in American government and policy. It is not perfect, but it is there.

The people who say that change is possible without voting, that protecting minority interests is possible without voting, rarely lay out a course for how those things could be accomplished.

Sometimes, they make vague promises that "activism" and "pushing for change" is what is needed instead of voting. This makes no sense. Engaging with elected officials is an inherent part of activism. Voting is a way of engaging with elected officials. Voting is activism.

No, some say. Not that kind of activism.

Okay, then what kind of activism?

Historically, the only way to accomplish change without voting is through physical force, i.e. warfare.

That's right. Warfare. Like the Civil War, or I guess what we will soon be calling Civil War I. There are, of course, other names for this besides warfare. Rebellion, revolution, extrajudicial killings. They all involve violence, they all involve killing people, and they all involve killing bystanders. They all also involve massive deaths on your side as well as the other.

But no! you say. What about Gandhi? Well, Gandhi was one actor in an anti-colonial movement that also involved violence and physical force. People died--more Indians than British.

Are deaths as part of a revolution or war worth it? That is a separate discussion to be had. I'm not commenting on that here.

I merely want to highlight for anyone who has not read between the lines that change, without voting, is very unlikely to occur without widescale violence. If you are promoting anti-voting rhetoric, then by default, you need to be okay with this possibility.

If you are not okay with that possibility, then you need to rethink what you are doing.

#vote #voting #tumblr discourse #us politics #nightmare fuel

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contemplatingoutlander · 12 hours ago

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Cartoonists passionately take on the Supreme Court’s abortion decision

Above are two cartoons by one of the cartoonists (Pia Guerra) featured in this Post article. Below is an excerpt about those cartoons:

Pia Guerra drew two cartoons: In one, a Republican elephant pops champagne in celebration while standing over a bleeding woman’s motionless body; in another, Death as apocalyptic horseman grips a scythe topped by a coat hanger — that symbol of unsafe abortions that visual artists employ as shorthand for imperiled reproductive rights.

Watching the news, Guerra saw “conservatives actually celebrating this ruling” with ��not even a little pretense of solemnity — just full-on laughing in the faces of women. They don’t give a crap about those who need this health care, that there are women right now being diverted out of state for lifesaving treatment because hospitals don’t want to risk being sued.

“That level of callousness only says this is in no way about ‘protecting the unborn,’” the Vancouver, B.C.-based artist adds, “but about punishing women for daring to claim autonomy. It’s disgusting.”

#us politics #women's reproductive rights #dobbs v. jackson women’s health organization #gop #cartoonists #pia guerra #cartoons #michael cavna #the washington post

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · a day ago

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that Oklahoma has the authority to prosecute non-Native people who commit crimes against a Native person on tribal lands.

The Justices, in a 5-4 decision, said that both the state and federal government have jurisdiction to prosecute these crimes. The case, Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, had been viewed as a pivotal one that cuts right into the heart of the fight over tribal sovereignty. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion.

Neil Gorsuch, who was joined by the three liberal Justice in his dissent, wrote that when the Cherokee were exiled to Oklahoma, they were promised that they would be free from state interference. “Where this Court once stood firm, today it wilts,” Gorsuch wrote. “Where our predecessors refused to participate in one State’s unlawful power grab at the expense of the Cherokee, today’s Court accedes to another’s.”

In 2015, Oklahoma state prosecutors charged Victor Castro-Huerta for the malnourishment and neglect of his five-year-old disabled stepdaughter. He was eventually sentenced to 35 years in prison. Castro-Huerta is not Native, but the victim, his stepdaughter, is a citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and the abuse took place on the Cherokee Reservation. Castro-Huerta challenged the decision by arguing that under the 2020 Supreme Court ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma, he can only be federally prosecuted. McGirt held that nearly half of Oklahoma is tribal land, and as such, under the Major Crimes Act, Oklahoma cannot prosecute crimes by Native citizens on tribal lands without federal approval.

In this case, Oklahoma argued that McGirt does not apply because the defendant was Native. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals had previously ruled that the state does not have the right to prosecute non-Native people for crimes with a Native victim on tribal land, but the Supreme Court disagreed.

This week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, a case that is seeking to limit the scope of a decision the Court made less than two years ago. In July 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma that Congress never annulled the Muscogee Nation reservation. After the McGirt ruling, an additional five reservations in the state were affirmed by lower courts—meaning that more than 40 percent of Oklahoma is now legally Indian Country.

Oklahoma argues that the scope of McGirt should be reviewed because the decision caused “sweeping turmoil” and “pitched Oklahoma’s criminal-justice system into a state of emergency.” The case centers on Victor Manuel Castro-Huerta, a non-Native man who was sentenced to 35 years in prison for neglecting his Native American stepchild while living on the Cherokee Nation reservation. His conviction was overturned by Oklahoma’s highest criminal-appeals court after he argued that the state lacked jurisdiction over his case. (He has already pleaded guilty to federal charges.) Oklahoma then appealed the case to the Supreme Court, reasoning that the state should retain jurisdiction over Castro-Huerta and all other non-Native defendants in crimes with Native victims.

To prove that McGirt wreaked havoc in Oklahoma, the state is claiming that it has lost jurisdiction over 18,000 prosecutions a year, many of which are now “going un-investigated and unprosecuted, endangering public safety.”

The problem is that this number seems to have come out of nowhere; Oklahoma doesn’t provide any source for it. Over the past several months, we tried to verify Oklahoma’s claim by filing information requests and collecting data from the governor’s office, the office of the attorney general, various district attorneys, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, tribes, and the federal judiciary. We found that Oklahoma’s claims did not hold up to scrutiny.

Despite this, there is reason to worry that Oklahoma’s dubious numbers could still convince a majority of the Court. McGirt was decided by a slim 5–4 majority, and since then, the makeup of the Court has shifted. In his 2020 dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts largely agreed with Oklahoma’s claims that upholding tribal land and treaty rights in Oklahoma would lead to chaos. If five justices side with Oklahoma in Castro-Huerta, they could rewrite state jurisdiction on more than 300 reservations in the United States, changing how crimes are prosecuted on tribal land, not just in Oklahoma.

Such a consequential decision should be based on information that has been publicly verified. Instead, Oklahoma is asking the Supreme Court to issue a decision based on speculation at best—and inaccurate and misleading information at worst.

When we asked the Attorney General’s office where the 18,000 estimate came from, a spokesperson told us that “due to active litigation, our office cannot disclose that information at this time.” But the state seems to expect that, even without a public source, the Supreme Court will rely on this number.

The Court should proceed with caution. According to data collected from the Tulsa district attorney and the Oklahoma District Attorneys Council, the total number of criminal cases filed in eastern Oklahoma (where McGirt is relevant) fell by 13,131 from 2019 to 2021—the years that the reservations of the six tribes were affirmed. A significant number, but less than 18,000. (It should be noted: These are the same years that the coronavirus pandemic reduced the number of arrests and prosecutions in Oklahoma and affected rates across the country.)

To see if there was a gap in criminal prosecutions—the state also claims that tribal and federal efforts to take over cases were “woefully insufficient” and left an “alarming gap” of a suggested 10,000 cases—we compared the decrease in state cases filed with the number of federal and tribal cases filed. Since their various reservations were affirmed, the tribes have filed more than 11,400 felony and misdemeanor criminal cases, and U.S. attorneys have filed nearly 1,000 cases in federal court in 2021. Taken together, that leaves a gap of fewer than 1,000 cases, and some of that may be more the result of the pandemic than any problem specific to Oklahoma and the reservations.

This isn’t the first time Oklahoma has provided the Supreme Court with numbers and estimates that lack a public source. In the years that Oklahoma has litigated the reservation issue in front of the Court, its estimates of how many past convictions could be affected have increased from “hundreds, if not thousands” in 2018 to “over 3,000” in 2020 to “at least 76,000” in its petition to the Court to take the Castro-Huerta case last fall, a number widely cited in media coverage at the time. But eventually, courts decided that McGirt would not apply to past convictions, and the state has stopped using the 76,000 estimate.

When we initially asked the Governor’s office how it came up with that number, its communications director, Carly Atchison, told us that the 76,000 estimate, while now moot, represents all cases that could have been affected by McGirt from January 2005 to April 2021. However, “as far as methodology goes, you’d need to ask the district attorneys. Our office was presented with the estimate, we did not help to compile it,” she wrote to us in an email. In a follow-up, she again distanced the office from the 76,000 number, but she still could not provide any transparency about how the Governor’s office may have arrived at that figure in the first place.

Both the Governor’s office and Oklahoma’s petition claimed the estimate came from district attorneys, but no district attorneys we spoke with knew what the Governor’s office was talking about. “To my knowledge, we have made no such communication to the Governor’s office, nor has one been requested,” Tim Webster, the district attorney for Atoka, Bryan, and Coal Counties, told The Atlantic. Steve Kunzweiler, the DA for Tulsa—eastern Oklahoma’s most populous county—told us he did not supply the governor’s estimate. The Attorney General’s office and the law firm Paul, Weiss, which filed the petition, did not respond to The Atlantic’s request for comment.

The most accurate way to know how many prosecutions were affected by McGirt would be to simply count. After spending months filing requests for data with local district attorneys, we found that McGirt cases are being tracked inconsistently among Oklahoma prosecutors and in some places not at all. The state of Oklahoma funds and administers the criminal-justice agencies that are best equipped to collect data on the impact of McGirt. There is no reason that the public debate should still be based on estimates with secret sources, instead of real and publicly available numbers.

According to data provided by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, we found that in the 18 months following the McGirt ruling, 68 people were released from Oklahoma’s custody to the street because of the decision. An additional 123 people were released to tribal or federal custody, 13 people successfully overturned one of their convictions but remain incarcerated by Oklahoma on other charges, and four defendants were already on probation at the time they won their appeal.

After months of litigation, Oklahoma courts eventually ruled that McGirt does not apply to old convictions. As a result, the actual number of Oklahoma inmates who have obtained relief based on McGirt is going down, not up. Of the 68 defendants released to the street, four have been returned to custody, eight more have had their order granting post-conviction relief revoked by an Oklahoma court, and in another 23 cases, district attorneys have filed motions asking the court to vacate its order granting the defendant relief. That leaves 33 Oklahoma defendants who—so far—have gotten off free and clear.

That’s not to say the McGirt decision had no impact. It was a considerable shift in criminal jurisdiction in eastern Oklahoma. When we spoke with Oklahoma prosecutors, they described the transition in criminal jurisdiction as tumultuous. “Chaotic is the best word to describe the environment that followed McGirt,” Kunzweiler, the Tulsa district attorney, told us.

But tribal leaders told us that though the transition was a huge logistical hurdle, the level of chaos was greatly influenced by the level of cooperation they received from local prosecutors and law enforcement. In some counties, local DAs and the tribes worked together to make sure that cases didn’t slip through the cracks. According to the Seminole Nation prosecuting attorney Timothy Brown, before the reservation was affirmed in April 2021, the local assistant DA sent the tribe a list of defendants who could be released from jail or state prosecution. Brown took that list and filed charges in the Seminole Nation’s court. In other districts, there was little or no coordination. Cherokee Nation Attorney General Sara Hill told us that in some counties within their reservations, “the elected district attorneys were so hostile to tribal jurisdiction that there was essentially zero communication … Cherokee Nation’s assistant attorney generals would literally sit through state-court criminal dockets … to identify cases that involved an Indian defendant.”

The tribes, for their part, have increased the capacity of their criminal-justice systems; they’ve filed thousands of cases, hired more prosecutors, and received federal funds to hire victim advocates and special prosecutors.

The Muscogee Nation, the tribe at the center of the 2020 Supreme Court decision, has hired nine criminal investigators to its Lighthorse Police Department, 20 more police officers, five new prosecutors, seven new legal support staff, and one new criminal investigator within the Muscogee Nation attorney general’s office. Since July 9, 2020, Muscogee Nation officials have made 1,622 arrests and filed 3,932 criminal cases. To date, Muscogee Nation has 63 cross-deputization agreements in place; this allows both state and tribal police to stop, arrest, and detain people no matter the Native status of the suspect or victim. Some tribes, such as the Chickasaw Nation, have even hired special assistant United States attorneys, who can prosecute cases in both tribal and federal courts, to help with the increased federal caseload. The Cherokee Nation alone committed nearly $30 million of its 2021–22 budget to criminal justice on its reservation—a historic amount. Of the eight new prosecutors that the Cherokee Nation has hired, four of them previously worked for Oklahoma district attorneys. Because tribal and federal prosecutors have higher salaries than Oklahoma prosecutors, Oklahoma DAs are losing staff and now facing shortages, according to Kunzweiler.

It is the constitutional role of Congress, not the Supreme Court, to change who has criminal jurisdiction on a reservation. Oklahoma started petitioning the Court to review the McGirt decision only after its attempts at congressional legislation to narrow the scope of the decision failed. Congress has acted, however. The most recent congressional spending bill allocated more than $62 million to help with the costs of increased tribal criminal jurisdiction. And the recent reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act expanded tribal jurisdiction over non-Native perpetrators for certain violent crimes.

In the McGirt case, Oklahoma invited the Supreme Court to make a decision based on fear and speculation rather than the law. Justice Neil Gorsuch and a majority of the Court rejected that invitation, noting that the disarray Oklahoma warned about wasn’t relevant to their judicial review. Two years later, we can now see that the state’s claims were exaggerated. But the role of the Court to interpret—not create—law hasn’t changed.

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