Yesterday, the House Natural Resources Committee held a hearing on Representative Deb Haaland’s Justice for Native Survivors of Sexual Violence Act, which she introduced in July with a bipartisan group of co-sponsors including Republicans Paul Cook and Tom Cole, as well as fellow Democrats Ruben Gallego and Sharice Davids. The bill would allow the law enforcement offices of tribal nations to prosecute non-tribal-citizen offenders for crimes including sexual assault, sex trafficking, and stalking.

It’s one of a handful of bills aimed at addressing the jurisdictional issues that have exacerbated the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s crisis, allowing perpetrators to walk free. Like the other proposals, it has languished in Congress for months. (The Senate version of this bill was brought by Democratic Senator Tina Smith and has similarly stalled.) Thursday’s House committee hearing was a step toward the bill being introduced to the full chamber. It also, however, featured an exchange that, more than any other in recent years, displayed just how much paternalism still exists among American conservatives, who are willing to do anything to prevent American citizens being subject to the laws of the nations they traverse.

Following an opening presentation from Representative Haaland, three Republicans—Louie Gohmert, Garret Graves, and Tom McClintock—immediately questioned her about the bill. McClintock began his statement by claiming to be “a strong supporter of tribal sovereignty.” The exchange that ensued suggested the opposite.

Worried about extending tribal jurisdiction to non–tribal citizens—McClintock repeatedly used the term “members”—the California Republican rolled out a puzzling hypothetical, one that was supposedly meant to show the inherent danger of allowing tribal courts to handle crimes that occur on tribal lands. “I’m a customer that goes to a casino, and I am charged with inappropriately touching a waitress there at the casino,” McClintock said.

The normal enforcement would be I would be tried in a federal court under all due process rights and the Bill of Rights, including the right to a jury of my peers. But under this legislation, if the accusation were made, I wouldn’t be tried in a federal court but a tribal court?

McClintock then leaned on one of conservatives’ favorite talking points when it comes to legislation that would dare increase the ability of tribes to institutionally combat violence against women: that of the mistakenly charged sex offender. Wondering aloud about a case in which his hypothetical casino attender was “frivolously accused,” McClintock dived headfirst into what was ultimately his central objection to the idea of a Native-run court dealing with non-Native people. “In California, many of these tribes number a few hundred to a thousand or two members, many of them related,” he brashly stated. “I assume the jury pool would be drawn from this tight-knit community in a tribal court, without the protection to due process rights.”

