Throughout the recent California election, Indian casino “gaming interests” has become one of the right’s bugbears, much as Big Tobacco and Big Pharma has become the left’s. What better example to see another occasion of the Democrats’ morally suspect fundraising, peddling influence and furthering a social vice. But, as Jacob Levy argues in the New Republic, casino political spending is hardly suspect and is in fact exactly what you would expect from the current setup:
Gambling may be a vice, it may be immoral, and it may be addictive. But whether or not it is has nothing to do with the political economy and moral economy of the gambling industry. What does affect those things is gambling’s ambiguous legal status. Except when gambling is run directly by the state (i.e. in lotteries), it’s subject to heavy and pretty arbitrary regulation. There’s ordinarily not some stable set of rules, which, if satisfied, entitles one to open a private casino. Instead, the opening of each casino requires laborious negotiations with state gambling commissions and/or legislatures and/or governors. Which means that every would-be casino operator enjoys the prospect of semi-monopolistic profits, but only if a set of political decisions go his way, and he can then keep potential competitors from benefiting from similar political decisions in the future.
If anyone has ever designed a way to prevent that combination of circumstances from leading to massive political spending, I haven’t heard about it. Tribal casinos certainly aren’t immune, since tribes are obligated to negotiate with states over the opening of each new casino–and since the question of which tribes get the federal recognition that triggers the right to operate casinos involves some discretion at the levels of the (federal) Bureau of Indian Affairs and Department of Interior. But neither are the tribes any more blameworthy than any other player in the gambling industry, all of which have to negotiate for the right to operate casinos. For that matter, the logic of the situation would also apply if, say, office-supply retailing was generally illegal, except for those retailers who managed to wangle a special dispensation from the state. Since the problem is structural, it can only be fixed with a structural solution–say, a general move toward legalization and procedural consistency. Any special focus on tribal gambling is dubious at best.
Of course, this is just a microcosm of the larger issue: both left and right think that their political donors are simply sharing a political ideology and common goal, while the other side’s donors (energy firms, biotech, trial lawyers, Indian casinos) are exerting sinister and untoward influence on the political process. Clearly dodgy influence peddling goes on, and it’s worth rooting these out and clarifying what goes on to the general public. But it’s also important to remember that the system works strongest when specific industry and interest-group self-interest dovetails with the larger abstract ideological tendencies of the political parties.
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