Cite as: 523 U. S. 696 (1998)
Opinion of Souter, J.
wrongly or rightly) had withheld the essential permission," ante, at 716. The District Court's original ruling, acknowledged in its most recent opinion and never challenged by Montana, was that the Tribe "at all relevant times . . . had a valid coal mining tax applicable to Westmoreland's mining on the Ceded Strip." App. to Pet. for Cert. 36. After the Ninth Circuit's ruling in Crow II that the mineral estate beneath the surface of the ceded strip was a part of the Tribe's reservation, 819 F. 2d, at 898, the District Court observed:
"This analysis of the Reservation status of the Crow coal compels the conclusion that the approval which the Department of the Interior gave to the 1976 tax ordinance was fully applicable to Westmoreland's mining of Crow Ceded Strip coal because that coal was and is a component of the Reservation land itself. The approval of the Department of Interior of the 1976 Crow Tribal Tax Code as it applied to activities on the Reservation was necessarily an approval of that tax as being applicable to Westmoreland's mining of Crow Tribal coal. Accordingly, the Interior Department's purported refusal to approve the tax as it might apply to any mining operation on the Ceded Strip was based on what the Ninth Circuit has found to be a mistaken interpretation of the applicable law." App. 286.
Thus, the Tribe's provision must now be recognized as valid for the period in question, and there is no apparent reason why the Tribe should be disqualified from seeking to obtain the State's excess revenues that should have gone to the Tribe under the Tribe's own tax regulation. While the Tribe could not have enforced the tax against Westmoreland without the Interior Department's approval, that is neither here nor there as between the Tribe and the State. And although the Tribe failed to obtain judicial review of the Department's refusal, that has no bearing on the equity of the State's retention of money to which it never had a valid
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