Here. An excerpt:

First, let’s be clear: Senator Grassley’s bold assertion that Native Americans cannot serve as impartial jurors is simply racist. The Sixth Amendment’s right to jury grants you the right to have a jury selected from the community in which the crime took place.  If a Native American committed an act of violence in Senator Grassley’s own Butler County, Iowa, chances are he’d face an all-White jury. That’s because Butler County is 98.95 percent White, and only 0.05 percent Native American. But I doubt Senator Grassley thinks that a Native American defendant couldn’t get a fair shake from his hometown Hawkeyes.  And there’s no reason to think that Native American jurors would act differently.

The other purportedly constitutional objection to the tribal protection provision stems from a 1978 Supreme Court case that originated right here in Washington state: Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe.  Suquamish tribal authorities arrested two men, Mark Oliphant and Daniel Belgarde, for crimes committed on Suquamish tribal lands. The defendants argued that the tribe could not charge them with any crime, no matter where it was committed, because they weren’t Indians. The Supreme Court agreed, but its reasoning is what’s most important: the Court never held that it was unconstitutional for tribal authorities to charge and try non-Indians, but rather that Congress’s “various actions and inactions in regulating criminal jurisdiction on Indian reservations demonstrated an intent to reserve jurisdiction over non-Indians for the federal courts.” Put differently, Congress just had to change its mind.

In a similar case about ten years later, Duro v. Reina, the Supreme Court determined that under existing federal law one tribe could not exercise criminal jurisdiction over an enrolled member of another tribe. So what happened? Congress simply changed its mind—and the law—to allow tribes to prosecute members of other tribes, explicitly overruling the Duro decision. Most recently, in 2004, the Supreme Court echoed this point by concluding, in United States v. Lara, that Congress has the power to “lift or relax” restrictions on tribal jurisdiction over criminal matters.

That’s what Congress is trying to do with these new VAWA provisions.  It’s not a constitutional hurdle—it’s a legislative one.  And the Senate just voted to remove that hurdle.