American Indian US Trial Court Nominee Divides Oklahoma GOP

Oklahoma Republicans are split on President Joe Biden’s recent nomination of a prominent American Indian lawyer to a trial court in the state.

The state’s Republican governor is calling on its two US senators to withdraw their support of Sara Hill, a former attorney general for Cherokee Nation.

Republican critics say she’s unfit to join the US District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma given her career in adversarial disputes with the state of Oklahoma.

“She’s anti-oil and gas and energy, she’s anti-agriculture, she’s anti-state’s rights,” Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) said in an interview with Bloomberg Law. “She’s more in tune with the rights of our Indian tribes than she is the state of Oklahoma.”

Pushback from high-ranking GOP officials such as Stitt comes after Oklahoma’s GOP Sens. James Lankford and Markwayne Mullin supported Hill. Lankford introduced and praised her nomination at her Nov. 15 confirmation hearing.

“I have no doubt that as a federal judge, Sara will be guided by the United States Constitution, a document that she knows and respects. I’m confident she will serve our state and our country extremely well,” Lankford said during the hearing.

Hill would be the first Native American woman to serve on the court, and the first appointed to any federal court in the state.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.

McGirt Aftermath

The Biden administration has this year prioritized working with Republican senators to fill judicial vacancies in their states.

The matter is urgent in the Northern District of Oklahoma, after the US Supreme Court ruled in McGirt v. Oklahoma that the state couldn’t prosecute tribal members for certain crimes that occurred on tribal lands. As a result, federal and tribal agencies—including the Cherokee Nation—have had to handle an influx of criminal cases.

The Tulsa-based US trial court saw an 66% increase in criminal cases filed between 2020 and 2021, and an additional 28% increase between 2021 and 2022, Lankford said during Hill’s confirmation hearing.

Hill co-authored an amicus brief on behalf of the Cherokee Nation, historians, and legal scholars in defense of the Muscogee Nation as a federally-recognized reservation and their ability to prosecute crimes on their land.

Stitt has been highly critical of the ruling, and has taken issue with Hill’s role in advocating in favor of the decision that he described as an existential threat to the future of Oklahoma.

“She’s right there in the middle of all of that,” Stitt said.

Stitt has often been at odds with Native American tribes in the state, and has butt heads with Hill while she represented the Cherokee Nation’s sovereignty and jurisdiction interests as attorney general.

“I don’t begrudge the Cherokees, they’re gonna be advocating for what’s best for them,” Stitt, a member of the Nation, said. “But as governor of the state of Oklahoma, I’m thinking about what’s best for the state of Oklahoma. And we’re just on different sides of that aisle.”

Stitt said that he’s sure Hill, who is now in private practice, is a “nice lady,” but that her career presents a clear bias against any matters related to the state of Oklahoma.

During her confirmation hearing, Hill made the distinction between her previous role as an advocate for the Cherokee Nation and what would be required of her as a judge, “one who takes the cases before them and looks at them fairly, impartially, and applies the law to the facts,” she said.

Also against Hill’s nomination is the chair of the Oklahoma Republican Party, state senator Nathan Dahm, who released a statement Nov. 27 calling on members of the party to make their disapproval known to the state’s US senators. The statement was first reported by Tulsa World.

Stitt said he’s asked Lankford and Mullin to withdraw their blue slips. Current Senate tradition requires that both home-state senators return the blue document for a nomination to move forward.

“I’ve been very clear with both of our US senators that I’m gonna be publicly opposing this,” Stitt said.

A spokesperson for Lankford said the senator hasn’t changed his position on Hill. Mullin’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.