Case No. 16-498 | D.C. Cir. Opinion
The Constitution assigns the power to decide cases to the judiciary, and the power to set the courts’ jurisdiction to Congress. Put another way, the courts may get to decide, but Congress gets to decide what they get to decide. The question in Patchak is at what point the latter power, assigned to Congress, impermissibly intrudes on the former power, which is reserved for the courts.
Patchak arises out a long-running dispute between David Patchak and the Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of the Pottawatomi Indians, known as the Gun Lake Tribe. In 2008, Mr. Patchak challenged the Interior Department’s plan to put a plot of land outside of Grand Rapids, Mich. into trust so that the Tribe could build a casino. Mr. Patchak’s initial challenge to the Department’s action, brought under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”), reached the Supreme Court (Patchak I, 567 U.S. 209 (2012)). The Court held that Mr. Patchak had prudential standing under the APA and permitted the suit to proceed.
During the remand proceedings of Patchak I, Congress passed the Gun Lake Trust Land Reaffirmation Act, Pub. L. No. 113-179, 128 Stat. 1913, in 2014. Two provisions of the law are at issue in Patchak II. First, the Act ratified the Interior Secretary’s decision to take the property into trust. Second, the Act states that any litigation relating to the property “shall not be filed or maintained in a District Court and shall be promptly dismissed,” including actions pending at the time the law was enacted (i.e., Mr. Patchak’s suit), but did not amend any underlying substantive or procedural laws.
Mr. Patchak argues that the law violates the separation of powers. By mandating that the courts dismiss Mr. Patchak’s suit without changing the substantive or procedural laws underlying his cause of action, Mr. Patchak argues that Congress improperly exercised judicial power. The resulting law directed the outcome of pending litigation, Mr. Patchak argues, which the Court forbade in the seminal Reconstruction Era case United States v. Klein, 80 U.S. (13 Wall.) 128 (1871). Mr. Patchak distinguishes the Gun Lake Act from the statute the Court upheld against a separation of powers last term in Bank Markazi v. Peterson, 136 S. Ct. 1310 (2016). There, the Court determined Congress acted within its authority because the law simply provided new substantive standards for courts to apply.
In response, the government argues that the Act merely withdraws a category of subject-matter jurisdiction pursuant to Congress’s constitutional power to delimit the jurisdiction of the inferior federal courts. The Act does not present a Klein problem, the government argues, because it amounts to a substantive change in the law that changes federal court jurisdiction and withdraws the government’s waiver of sovereign immunity in the APA as to the contested property. In other words, the Act respects the separation of powers because Congress did not tell the courts how to resolve Mr. Patchak’s suit; it merely changed the jurisdiction of the federal courts in a way that left them with no choice but to dismiss it.
The Court’s decision could potentially be far-reaching. One commentator has noted that the case could have ramifications in administrative law, since agency interpretations of the law are also binding on the courts, through Chevron deference, and in administrative adjudications. See Andrew Hessick, Keeping an Eye on Patchak v. Zinke, Yale J. on Reg.: Notice and Comment (July 27, 2017), http://yalejreg.com/nc/keeping-an-eye-on-patchak-v-zinke/. With the scope of executive, legislative, and judicial power at stake, Patchak could be one of the most noteworthy cases to fly beneath the radar on the court’s docket this term.