Patchak v. Zinke

Case Year: 2018

Case Ruling: 6-3

Opinion Justice: Thomas

FACTS

The Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians (“Band”) resides in Michigan near the township of Wayland. In the early 2000s, the Band identified a 147-acre parcel of land in Wayland, known as the Bradley Property, where it wanted to build a casino. The Band asked the Secretary to invoke the Indian Reorganization Act to take the Bradley Property into trust. The Secretary agreed but before it formally took the land into trust, a nearby landowner, David Patchak, filed a lawsuit a federal district court challenging Secretary’s decision in various grounds. Patchak’s case eventually reached the Supreme Court under the name Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians v. Patchak (Patchak I). The Court did not reach a decision on the merits of the dispute but instead held on procedural grounds that “Patchak’s suit may proceed;” and the case went back to the district court.

While the case was in the district court, Congress passed the Gun Lake Act of 2014, which reaffirmed that the Bradley Property “trust land” and ratified the actions of the Secretary of the Interior in taking the land into trust. The Act, in Section 2(b) when on to provide:

No Claims—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, an action (including an action pending in a Federal court as of the date of enactment of this Act) relating to the land described in subsection (a) shall not be filed or maintained in a Federal court and shall be promptly dismissed.

Based on Section 2(b) the District Court dismissed Patchak’s suit for lack of jurisdiction, and the court of appeals affirmed. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to determine whether Section 2(b) violates Article III of the Constitution

OPINION

Justice Thomas announced the judgment of the Court and delivered an opinion, in which Justice Breyer, Justice Alito, and Justice Kagan join

The Constitution creates three branches of Government and vests each branch with a different type of power …

The separation of powers, among other things, prevents Congress from exercising the judicial power. One way that Congress can cross the line from legislative power to judicial power is by “usurp[ing] a court’s power to interpret and apply the law to the [circumstances] before it.”  The simplest example would be a statute that says, “In Smith v. Jones, Smith wins.” At the same time, the legislative power is the power to make law, and Congress can make laws that apply retroactively to pending lawsuits, even when it effectively ensures that one side wins.

To distinguish between permissible exercises of the legislative power and impermissible infringements of the judicial power, this Court’s precedents establish the following rule: Congress violates Article III when it “compel[s] … findings or results under old law.”  But Congress does not violate Article III when it “changes the law.”

Section 2(b) changes the law. Specifically, it strips federal courts of jurisdiction over actions “relating to” the Bradley Property. Before the Gun Lake Act, federal courts had jurisdiction to hear these actions. Now they do not. This kind of legal change is well within Congress’ authority and does not violate Article III.

Statutes that strip jurisdiction “chang[e] the law” for the purpose of Article III, , just as much as other exercises of Congress’ legislative authority … Thus, when Congress strips federal courts of jurisdiction, it exercises a valid legislative power no less than when it lays taxes, coins money, declares war, or invokes any other power that the Constitution grants it.

Indeed, this Court has held that Congress generally does not violate Article III when it strips federal jurisdiction over a class of cases … Jurisdiction-stripping statutes, the Court explained [in Ex parte McCardle], do not involve “the exercise of judicial power” or “legislative interference with courts in the exercising of continuing jurisdiction.” … [That is,] Congress generally does not infringe the judicial power when it strips jurisdiction because, with limited exceptions, a congressional grant of jurisdiction is a prerequisite to the exercise of judicial power …

Patchak does not dispute Congress’ power to withdraw jurisdiction from the federal courts. He instead [argues] that §2(b) violates Article III, even if it strips jurisdiction. [R]elying on United States v. Klein 128 (1872), Patchak argues … that the last four words of §2(b)—“shall be promptly dismissed”—direct courts to reach a particular outcome. But a statute does not violate Article III merely because it uses mandatory language. Instead of directing outcomes, the mandatory language in §2(b) “simply imposes the consequences” of a court’s determination that it lacks jurisdiction because a suit relates to the Bradley Property.  [S]ee McCardle.

Patchak compares §2(b) to the statute this Court held unconstitutional in Klein … Klein held that [the 1870] statute infringed the executive power by attempting to “change the effect of … a pardon.”  Klein also held that the statute infringed the judicial power, although its reasons for this latter holding were not entirely clear.

[T]he statute in Klein “infringed the judicial power, not because it left too little for courts to do, but because it attempted to direct the result without altering the legal standards governing the effect of a pardon—standards Congress was powerless to prescribe.”  Congress had no authority to declare that pardons are not evidence of loyalty, so it could not achieve the same result by stripping jurisdiction whenever claimants cited pardons as evidence of loyalty. Nor could Congress confer jurisdiction to a federal court but then strip jurisdiction from that same court once the court concluded that a pardoned claimant should prevail under the statute.

Patchak’s attempts to compare §2(b) to the statute in Klein are unpersuasive. Section 2(b) does not attempt to exercise a power that the Constitution vests in another branch. And unlike the selective jurisdiction-stripping statute in Klein, §2(b) strips jurisdiction over every suit relating to the Bradley Property. Indeed, Klein itself explained that statutes that do “nothing more” than strip jurisdiction over “a particular class of cases” are constitutional.  That is precisely what §2(b) does …

We conclude that §2(b) of the Gun Lake Act does not violate Article III of the Constitution. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is, therefore, affirmed.

Chief Justice Roberts, with whom Justice Kennedy and Justice Gorsuch join, dissenting

Chief Justice Marshall wrote that the Constitution created a straightforward distribution of authority: The Legislature wields the power “to prescribe general rules for the government of society,” but “the application of those rules to individuals in society” is the “duty” of the Judiciary. Fletcher v. Peck (1810). Article III, in other words, sets out not only what the Judiciary can do, but also what Congress cannot.

Congress violates this arrangement when it arrogates the judicial power to itself and decides a particular case. We first enforced that rule in United States v. Klein (1872) … This Court [held that] Congress, in addition to impairing the President’s pardon power, had “prescribe[d] rules of decision to the Judicial Department … in cases pending before it.” …

[T]he facts of this case are stark … When Congress passed the [Gun Lake Act] in 2014, no other suits relating to the Bradley Property were pending, and the [statute of limitations on challenges to the Secretary’s action] … had expired …

Recognizing that the “clear intent” of Congress was “to moot this litigation,” the District Court dismissed Patchak’s case against the Secretary. The D.C. Circuit affirmed, also based on the “plain” directive of §2(b) [that is, Section 2(b)].

Congress has previously approached the boundary between legislative and judicial power, but it has never gone so far as to target a single party for adverse treatment and direct the precise disposition of his pending case. Section 2(b)—remarkably—does just that …

I would hold that Congress exercises the judicial power when it manipulates jurisdictional rules to decide the outcome of a particular pending case. Because the Legislature has no authority to direct entry of judgment for a party, it cannot achieve the same result by stripping jurisdiction over a particular proceeding …

Over and over, the plurality intones that §2(b) does not impinge on the judicial power because the provision “changes the law. But all that §2(b) does is deprive the court of jurisdiction in a single proceeding. If that is sufficient to change the law, the plurality’s rule “provides no limiting principle” on Congress’s ability to assume the role of judge and decide the outcome of pending cases …

In my view, the concept of “changing the law” must imply some measure of generality or preservation of an adjudicative role for the courts … The Court, to date, has never sustained a law that withdraws jurisdiction over a particular lawsuit.

The closest analogue is of course Ex parte McCardle (1869), which the plurality nonchalantly cites as one of its leading authorities... [even though] McCardle has been alternatively described as “caving to the political dominance” of the Radical Republicans or “acceding to Congress’s effort to silence the Court.” Read for all it is worth, the decision is also inconsistent with the approach the Court took just three years later in Klein, where Chief Justice Chase (a dominant character in this drama) stressed that “[i]t is of vital importance” that the legislative and judicial powers “be kept distinct.”

The facts of McCardle, however, can support a more limited understanding of Congress’s power to divest the courts of jurisdiction. For starters, the repealer provision covered more than a single pending dispute; it applied to a class of cases, barring anyone from invoking the Supreme Court’s appellate jurisdiction in habeas cases for the next two decades. In addition, the Court’s decision did not foreclose all avenues for judicial review of McCardle’s complaint. As Chase made clear—and confirmed later that year in his opinion for the Court in Ex parte Yerger (1869) —the statute did not deny “the whole appellate power of the Court.” McCardle, by taking a different procedural route and filing an original habeas action, could have had his case heard on the merits.

Section 2(b), on the other hand, has neither saving grace. It ends Patchak’s suit for good. His federal case is dismissed, and he has no alternative means of review anywhere else … Section 2(b) thus reaches further than the typical jurisdictional repeal … Because [it] singles out Patchak’s suit, specifies how it must be resolved, and deprives him of any judicial forum for his claim, the decision to uphold that provision surpasses even McCardle as the highwater mark of legislative encroachment on Article III.

Indeed, although the stakes of this particular dispute may seem insignificant, the principle that the plurality would enshrine is of historic consequence. In no uncertain terms, the plurality disavows any limitations on Congress’s power to determine judicial results, conferring on the Legislature … authority to pick winners and losers in pending litigation as it pleases …

I respectfully dissent.