Insular cases are good---it allows the court to stop subjugation and to reign in political branches.
Russel 17 (Russell, Rennie. Graduate of Harvard, received his J.D. from NYU, where he served as an Articles Editor for NYU Law Review. “A Qualified Defense of the Insular Cases Notes”. New York University Law Review, Vol 92, Issue 5. Published 2017. https://heinonline.org/HOL/P?h=hein.journals/nylr92&i=1717. Accessed 19/07/23.) //Ulven
Respect for local governance arrangements weighs heaviest in Tuaua, where the court suggested enforcing the Citizenship Clause in American Samoa would entail “the autocratic subjugation of free people”153 and the “forcible imposition of citizenship against the majoritarian will.”154 Accommodation of the Samoans’ desire to associate politically on their own terms is not merely one factor; it is dispositive on the question of whether enforcing the Citizenship Clause would be “anomalous,” “an irregular intrusion into the autonomy of Samoan democratic decision-making.”155 Accommodationist concerns—respecting local governance decisions and protecting local culture, no matter the constitutional deviation—are now at the heart of the Insular doctrine.156
The evolutions and contortions of doctrine, their ramifications and redefinitions in light of new congressional and executive policies, the adoption or mingling of a new functional test—all these worked to ratify the political branches’ latter-day policy of promoting self-governance in the territories and protecting their cultures, just as the weak natural-rights limitations espoused by the Insular Court would allow Congress a free hand to govern its colonies as it pleased. By propagating thin, notional limits on government action, yet never finding government conduct to exceed these limits, the Court retained a role to rein in the political branches should they ever go too far.157