The plan’s ‘respect’ for self-determination entrenches second-class citizenship and cultural genocide.
Campbell '22 [James T; Yale Law School, J.D. 2020; Yale College, B.A. 2013; "Aurelius’s Article III Revisionism: Reimagining Judicial Engagement with the Insular Cases and “The Law of the Territories”"; 2022; pp. 2645; https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/131.8_Campbell_ei85tf4k.pdf; ror]
Without a law of the territories, there is only denial. Aurelius suggests that in a post-Insular Cases world, we might say that the Constitution “applies” equally to the territories, but the foreseeable reality is that their wholesale disenfranchisement and subordination will endure if not deepen.439 A law of the territories is necessary to police promise breaking and to reinforce the political legitimacy of forthcoming self-determination at the same time that it is necessary to prevent the notion of “respect” for self-determination, Indigenous rights, or autonomy from weaponizing into a license for invidious discrimination and permanent neglect. Without this, Aurelius-style constitutionalism foreshadows twin harms: the further entrenchment of second-class citizenship and—to borrow the words of Judge Poole—“a genocide pact for diverse native cultures.”440