Commentary –

Tribal Moratorium Is No Solution

 By Chris Powell

Because it confers the right to open a casino, almost everybody wants the federal government’s recognition as an Indian tribe. Ten or so applications from Connecticut alone are pending with the US Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The bureau’s director, Kevin Gover, told Congress last month that the bureau should get out of the tribal recognition business because gambling has politicized it. He suggested that Congress legislate some other process for recognizing tribes and conferring casino rights.

Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, who has received appeals for help from towns in which tribes or incipient tribes are located, quickly sent a letter to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit, endorsing Gover’s comments. Blumenthal asked for a moratorium on tribal recognition.

A moratorium might satisfy the two major political factions on the issue in Connecticut, the potential neighbors of casinos and the two tribes that already have them, the Mashantucket Pequots and the Mohegans. For a moratorium would not only prevent new casinos; it would preserve the Pequots’ and Mohegans’ lock on the business. By contrast, the third political faction here, the tribes applying for federal recognition, are small; as speculative business ventures more than tribes (what the Pequots and Mohegans themselves were before recognition), they will have few members until casino rights are secured. Thus there is no risk for a politician to call for a moratorium on recognition; it would please both ordinary residents and the casino interests.

The problem with a moratorium is that, as offensive as more recognitions would be because of their true purpose, the law still establishes the right of people to form tribes and to apply for recognition. And it would be wrong to deny anyone his rights for anything because of some merely administrative or political difficulty in securing them.

No, the solution to the tribal recognition problem is not to suspend anyone’s rights administratively but rather to redefine those rights under the law. That would mean amending the federal Indian Gaming Act to return to the states absolute power over casino gambling, including gambling on Indian reservations – to sever the link between tribal recognition and casinos, and to establish that, like all other businesses, Indian casinos should operate at the sufferance of states and be subject to public sovereignty, which would include prohibition.

There never was any public benefit in giving Indian tribes exemption from state gambling laws, never any public benefit in carrying the contrivance of tribal sovereignty that far. This has served only to bestow lucrative privilege on a few strategically located tribes.

To achieve this reform, Connecticut’s attorney general and everyone else opposed to the spread of casino gambling or, more importantly, opposed to the offense to democracy in awarding casino licenses by ethnicity, should write to members of Congress, not to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Of course members of Congress, and particularly Connecticut’s members of Congress, will be reluctant to respond favorably for a while, on account of their reliance on the political contributions from Indian casinos. But if there is enough clamor, democracy will prevail over privilege.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)