714
Opinion of the Court
when it noted, in Crow I, that the Tribe "is apparently not entitled to any refund" of taxes Westmoreland had paid to Montana. 650 F. 2d, at 1113, n. 13.
The Tribe now maintains, however, that the disgorgement remedy approved by the Ninth Circuit does not fall within the "refund" category. The Tribe suggests two ways of analyzing its claim. First, Westmoreland was liable for tax payments, but it paid the wrong sovereign; the Tribe, not the State, should have been the recipient of those payments. Second, the State's taxes adversely affected the Tribe's economy by reducing the demand for the Tribe's coal and the royalties the Tribe could charge; a remedial order transferring Westmoreland's 1975-1982 tax payments from Montana to the Tribe would eliminate the enrichment unjustly gained by the State at the Tribe's expense.
Before inspecting the Tribe's justifications for the disgorgement ordered by the Court of Appeals, we place in clear view a pathmarking decision this Court rendered less than two years after our summary affirmance in Crow II.14
In Cotton Petroleum Corp. v. New Mexico, 490 U. S. 163 (1989), we held that the IMLA did not preempt New Mexico's nondiscriminatory severance taxes on the production of oil and gas on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation by Cotton Petroleum, a non-Indian lessee. Id., at 186-187. In so holding, we acknowledged that the same on-reservation production of oil and gas was subject to tribal severance taxes, id., at 167-169, and that New Mexico's taxes might reduce demand for on-reservation leases, id., at 186-187. Cotton Petroleum clarified that neither the IMLA, nor any other federal law, categorically preempts state mineral severance taxes imposed, without discrimination, on all extraction enterprises in the State, including on-reservation operations. "Unless and until Congress provides otherwise, each of the
14 "A summary disposition affirms only the judgment of the court below, and no more may be read into our action than was essential to sustain that judgment." Anderson v. Celebrezze, 460 U. S. 780, 785, n. 5 (1983).
Page: Index Previous 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007