Out-of-state play

Bill could change casino landscape

Residents of Arkansas are all too familiar with the state’s casino war, having watched a battle play out between Cherokee Nation Businesses and Gulfside Casino Partnership over who should receive a license to operate a casino in Pope County. The courts are currently settling the issue.

While Cherokee is seeking a commercial, not Indian, gaming facility, a bill currently moving through Congress could create a path for politically well-connected casino operatives and their allied Tribal interests to place Tribal gaming casinos all throughout our state.

The bill, House Resolution 1619, will create America’s first-ever off-reservation casino approved by Congress at the behest of Wallace Cheves, an infamous gambling operative previously indicted by a U.S. court and fined in multiple states for questionable gambling activities.

After failing to change South Carolina’s restrictive gaming laws, he and Catawba Indian Nation are now seeking to construct their casino across state lines, over the objection of the state legislature, the governor, and the residents on the ground.

It’s unclear whether Cheves and Catawba can legally construct this casino. Although the Department of Interior previously ruled that it didn’t have the legal authority to take the land into trust for them, it recently changed its mind after Cheves showered the White House and its allied political causes with hundreds of thousands in political donations.

A federal appeal filed recently by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the Cherokee Nation seeks to determine the justifiability of the DOI’s flip-flop. Among other issues, the Tribe claims that Cheves aims to build this casino over their historic ancestral land and that the South Carolina-based Catawba can’t legally construct this casino in North Carolina. However, HR1619 will effectively prevent the judicial branch from ever making legal determinations. The legislation will give Cheves his casino before the U.S. Court of Appeals even has the chance to rule one way or the other.

If passed, the legislation may create a new pathway for rich developers to put a casino anywhere they’d like by joining with a Tribe and using politics. This precedent would particularly impact Arkansas (which itself is a Siouan Indian word thought to mean “southern place”) since indigenous settlers dominated the state before the government forced them to relocate during the Trail of Tears.

Given the significant ties that many Tribes and Nations have to Arkansas, it’s not difficult to imagine other well-connected casino moguls capitalizing on the precedent set by HR1619. These unscrupulous business interests could follow suit by having their own political connections in Congress sideswipe the courts to construct off-reservation casinos in the state for them and their purported Tribal interests, perhaps while bulldozing over the ancestral lands of Tribes with legitimate ties to the state in the process. As a result, Arkansas families could be faced with casinos in their neighborhoods owned and operated by entities as questionable and unaccountable as those affiliated with Cheves.

Until this point, the Tribes and Nations connected to Arkansas have shown great respect for the legal process. The current Cherokee/Gulfside battle has highlighted this point. The last thing this state needs is a disruptive bill to cause new casino battles.

As the ranking member of the Natural Resources Committee, Rep. Bruce Westerman’s voice will have great sway when this legislation makes its way to the House Floor for a roll-call vote. Will he stand for his state’s interests by calling on his colleagues to oppose it? Time will tell, but at the very least, his long history as a staunch consumer advocate and policeman for the cause of law and order presents a case for optimism.