SCOTUS (5-4) Rules in Favor of Indian Nations in Health Care Funding Dispute

Feb 28, 2023Feb 28, 2023 

The Supreme Court today decided a statutory interpretation case in which millions of dollars were at stake. Without getting too far into the weeds, the issue was whether the federal government is obligated to pay the costs incurred by Indian tribes to administer health programs funded by Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers. The majority ruled that the statute in question -- the  Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act ("ISEA"), 25 U. S. C. §5301 et seq. -- requires (unambiguously, apparently) the U.S. to reimburse the tribes for those administrative costs.

The Court's analysis (written by Chief Justice Roberts) invoked the text of the statute, the policy Congress sought to further when it passed the ISEA, and the history of the statutory provisions in question. The analysis is pretty mainstream for the Court, although originalists often abjure policy and legislative history as too squishy to be relied upon.

As the Court's opinion points out, there is an interpretive tool called "the Indian canon," which calls for statutory language that is ambiguous to be construed in favor of Indian tribes. One of the courts of appeals relied on the Indian canon to rule against the federal government. The other lower court produced three opinions in which one of the judges in the majority found the statute to be ambiguous and subject to the Indian canon, while the other judge in the majority thought the provision unambiguously supported the tribe. 

The SCOTUS majority, after mentioning the Indian canon in its description of the rulings below, never went back to it. Maybe the Court found the statute's meaning to be unambiguous. And maybe the Chief decided to skip the canon in order to keep Justice Kavanaugh as the all-important fifth vote. 

Canons of statutory interpretation are getting increased scrutiny at the Court, as evidenced by a recent concurring opinion by Justice Kavanaugh (Rudisill v. Secretary, Dep't of Veterans Affairs, April 16, 2024; see also Daniel Harawa, Justices lean toward narrow reading of aggravated identity theft, SCOTUSBlog, Feb 28, 2023 ("In many ways, Monday’s oral argument in Dubin v. United States felt like a legislation class in law school, with various canons of statutory construction being bandied about"; the defendant prevailed in this identity-fraud case in a 9-0 opinion by Justice Sotomayor that Professor Harawa described as "a tutorial in statutory interpretation"). 

Is a free-for-all over competing interpretive canons evidence that canons are alive and well? Or that interpretive canons are seen as makeweights with little more than rhetorical value?