|
Dino Rossi must have thought it was Vigilia di Natale when he saw the news story on the front page of the Seattle Post-intelligencer about Gov. Christine Gregoire’s $650,000 campaign donation from the Indian tribes, suggesting it was quid pro quo for her 2005 rejection of a gambling compact they didn’t like.
Quid pro quo, i.e., “something given or received for something,” is the nicer way of saying bribe or, in a quote from a University of Nevada-Las Vegas professor, “payoff.” What a professor from Nevada is even doing in this news story I don’t know, other than William Thompson was said to have been studying tribal gambling since 1988. The compact The Gov ordered rewritten would have been worth more than $140 million a year to the state in revenue sharing funds from the tribes.
Unlike 22 other states with tribal gambling compacts, Washington doesn’t get a dime in revenue sharing, reports the P-I, despite the fact tribes with casinos pulled in $1.02 billion in 2005, $1.19 billion in 2006 and $1.34 billion in 2007. They have given $604,131 to the state Democratic Party since 2004 and the party has given the governor $1.6 million. Indian tribes now are the biggest campaign contributors of any special interest group in the United States, according to One Nation United, the national group that grew out of Washington’s Property Owners Assn., and still headed by Barbara Lindsay.
“The tribes outspend the defense industry, teachers’ unions, labor and even the manufacturing industry,” says Lindsay. “And no other ‘governments’ can make campaign contributions. Nor can other Americans give ‘corporate’ money to federal candidates.” “Because tribal governments are providing millions of dollars more than the rest of us can to political parties, candidates and incumbents.” she said, “they are essentially acting as if they are political parties. Thus, the tribes have become unregulated parties to America’s political system. Our ability to have a meaningful voice in how our own government is run is threatened when any special interest group has such inordinate power to control the outcome of our elections.”
Gov. Gregoire rarely misses a chance to comment, but she ducked out on this latest one. It is left up to her spokesman, Pearse Edwards, to say, “There is no quid pro quo,” and explain her action as an effort to keep gambling from expanding too quickly.
A compact agreed to in 2005 by the Spokane tribe and the state Gambling Commission allowed more video machines and revenue sharing that could generate up to $140 million annually, depending on how many tribes were in on it. Gov. Gregoire wrote the Gambling Commission, asking it to renegotiate the compact, specifically mentioning the revenue sharing part, which disappeared from the renegotiated compact that was signed onto in 2006 by Gov. Gregoire and 27 of the state’s 29 federally recognized tribes.
At this writing, Republican leaders in the Legislature have called for an inquiry, which Democrats have yet to agree to, and I doubt ever will so long as they are in the majority. They’ll say she was exercising her authority as a government to a government.
By the way, watch out for HR 2837 in Congress if the D’s wind up with majorities and the presidency this fall. Intended to speed up recognition of more new Indian tribes, it calls for that process to move from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to an independent Commission, members to be named by the tribes. It allows tribes previously denied recognition to re-apply and only need to prove they were a tribe back to 1900, rather than existing prior to that year. If it passes, we’ll be up the gazoo in tribes and casinos.
Oh, Vigilia di Natale? Christmas Eve.
(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)
|
