512
Opinion of the Court
The Tribe's second argument under § 396a concentrates on the "skew[ing]" effect of Secretary Hodel's 1985 intervention, i. e., his direction to Deputy Assistant Secretary Fritz to withhold action on Peabody's appeal from the Area Director's decision setting a royalty rate of 20 percent. Tr. of Oral Arg. 50; see supra, at 497-498. The Secretary's actions, both in intervening in the administrative appeal process, and in approving the amended Lease, the Tribe urges, were not based upon an assessment of the merits of the royalty issue; instead, the Tribe maintains, they were attributable entirely to the undue influence Peabody exerted through ex parte communications with the Secretary. See Brief for Respondent 40-42. Underscoring that the Tribe had no knowledge of those communications or of Secretary Hodel's direction to Fritz, see supra, at 498, the Tribe asserts that its bargaining position was seriously compromised when it resumed negotiations with Peabody in 1985. See, e. g., Tr. of
that it "overstates" Congress' aim to attribute to the Legislature a purpose "to guarantee Indian tribes the maximum profit available." Cotton Petroleum Corp. v. New Mexico, 490 U. S. 163, 179 (1989). Beyond doubt, the IMLA was designed "to provide Indian tribes with a profitable source of revenue." Ibid., quoted supra, at 493. But Congress had as a concrete objective in that regard the removal of certain impediments that had applied particularly to mineral leases on Indian land. See Cotton, 490 U. S., at 179 ("Congress was . . . concerned . . . with matters such as the unavailability of extralateral mineral rights on Indian land."); S. Rep. No. 985, at 2 ("[O]n the public domain the discoverer of a mineral deposit gets extra-lateral rights and can follow the ore beyond the side lines indefinitely, while on the Indian lands under the act of June 30, 1919, he is limited to the confines of the survey markers not to exceed 600 feet by 1,500 feet in any one claim. The draft of the bill herewith would permit the obtaining of sufficient acreage to remove the necessity for extralateral rights with all its attending controversies."); H. R. Rep. No. 1872, 75th Cong., 3d Sess., 2 (1938) (same). That impediment-removing objective is discrete from the Secretary's lease approval role under the IMLA. Again, we find no solid basis in the IMLA, its regulations, or lofty statements in legislative history for a legally enforceable command that the Secretary disapprove Indian coal leases unless they survive "an independent market study," post, at 519, or satisfy some other extratextual criterion of tribal profitability.
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