Right-wing Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is outraged that his colleagues declined to take up what has become one of his notoriously idiosyncratic pet issues on Tuesday, Newsweek reported — calling the refusal to hear the case a "grave mistake."
"The case, brought by the group Apache Stronghold, sought to prevent the federal government's planned transfer of Oak Flat, a site in Arizona sacred to the Apache, to a mining company," reported Jenna Sundel. "Gorsuch argued that the Court should have agreed to hear the case, saying the lower court's decision 'rests on questionable legal footing.' The Court's order left intact a Ninth Circuit ruling that permitted the land transfer to proceed."
Apache Stronghold had sued under the theory that the mining company desecrating the sacred site was prohibited under the U.S. Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The Ninth Circuit had ruled against this legal reasoning.
Gorsuch, appointed to the court by President Donald Trump after a controversial battle in the Senate following the GOP's decision to hold the vacant seat open until former President Barack Obama had left office, is one of the few justices who served on a court in the West, where tribal issues and federal land use have been particularly thorny issues. He has made the rights of tribal groups one of his most passionate issues on the court, often breaking with his right-wing colleagues to join liberal opinions — or if he has to, standing on his own.
Gorsuch was the author of the Supreme Court's explosive McGirt v. Oklahoma decision in 2020, which forced the U.S. government to honor an 1866 treaty with the Muscogee Nation essentially making the entire eastern half of Oklahoma sovereign tribal land for the purposes of law enforcement.
That ruling was partially weakened, although not formally overturned, by Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, from which Gorsuch issued a bitter dissent alongside the liberal justices.