End of a golden tribal era; Vegas Vic gets his due

Already gaming pundits are reading the entrails of the presidential election and predicting that while a Donald Trump administration could be Bad News for Internet gambling it will be Very Bad News Indeed for tribal gaming. Words like “disaster” are being used. (FinCEN regulation of the casino industry for money laundering is expected to be eased, however.) In the case of ‘Net betting, the last few years may be looked back upon as a missed opportunity, state after state having lost its legislative nerve to enact Web gaming. Had more states followed the lead of New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware, the fait accompli of Internet gambling might have been too much for Washington to try and unspool.

When it comes to Native American gaming, some argue that there’s not a lot of growth to impede. However, when it comes to land-into-trust applications, the Obama administration inherited a huge backlog from its predecessor and cleared the road, processing 2,285 applications of which fewer than 1% involved gaming, urban mythology be damned. The incoming administration inherits four final-stage applications, two in Oklahoma, one in Washington State and one in Indiana (which Gov. Mike Pence [R] might want to squelch in his next role as Vice President).

Whether or not the tribal issue was gaming-related, the Barack Obama years are likely to be looked upon as a golden era for tribal-federal relations. The list of initiatives and accomplishments is far-reaching and lengthy, much too much so to be summarized. Native American Rights Fund Executive Director John Echohawk said, “What I hear from tribal leaders is pretty much a consensus that [Barack] Obama is the best president Native American people ever had.” Adds tribal-gaming pundit Dave Palermo, the Obama administration “aggressively pursued Indian land and water rights settlements and approved often-controversial tribal casino projects, generating the ire of states’ rights advocates, local governments and, occasionally, other tribes.” In total, Palermo concludes, the outgoing administration expanded tribal sovereignty and economic self-reliance (a goal shared with the Ronald Reagan administration when the latter passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988).

As University of North Dakota Law School Dean Kathryn Rand says, “Obama’s legacy in Indian gaming was to treat it as a still-much-needed economic-development tool for tribes.” To this end, his administration did away with the George W. Bush administration’s “commutability” rule for tribal casinos, intended to curb their spread. But some work is left undone. It remains for the incoming administration to decide whether to pursue a congressional clarification of the Carcieri v. Salazar ruling, which leaves many tribes not recognized after 1934 in legal limbo. One tribe in particular, the Mashpee Wampanoag, has a casino project hanging in the balance due to Carcieri‘s ambiguous language. Native American rights are still a work in progress and the next regime in Washington, D.C., will — by tribal standards — have a difficult act to follow.

* An important gap has been filled. Have you been down in the dumps because your bobble head collection lacks a Vegas Vic? Well rejoice! The Pioneer Casino (in reality a souvenir store) has teamed up with the National Bobblehead Hall of Fame & Museum to present a Vegas Vic statuette. One might argue that it’s Vegas Vic’s famously waving arm, not his head, that ought to be bobbling. Either way, you can only get them at the former Pioneer Club, just as you have to head to the Mob Museum to get bobble heads of Meyer Lansky, Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano. It’s fortunate that Vic doesn’t have to rub elbows with that seamy bunch, unless you’ve got the whole lot of them on your desktop.