The American Spectator

Expert source Fergus Bordewich identifies the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act as the primary virus that has infected all of Congress and transformed business as usual graft into a national threat. It is moments before we become the United States of America versus the United Casinos of America, and guess who, with 228 tribes and 405 gambling operations in 30 states, has bought dozens of members of both Federal houses and hundreds of members of state legislatures to protect its interests and silence the opposition? Confessed big chief crook Abramowich was working for Congress-created Big Chief Crook. The sham of Indian gaming rights is the same sham as one for the road rights. There is no rationality in granting the abused native American descendants a license to endorse lawlessness and suicidal vice; and there is no excuse for pretending not to notice that organized crime and ravenous state legislatures now exploit the casinos as robber kingdoms preying on the elderly and stupid. Abramowich exploited the exploiters; he was not much more than a disease carrier like Typhoid Mary. The virus that Congress created is the virus that Congress now watches lay waste to national virtue and its own honor.

Offer a bald example that you must stomach if you believe you are immune to the virus. The compulsive gambling magnet Foxwood’s in Connecticut is now one of the largest casinos on earth. It hangs upon the mindlessly lawyerly 1983 claim that two elderly Mashantucket Pequot Indian women lived on a strip of Connecticut land in the 1930s, and so therefore their descendants enjoy the sovereignty of Monaco or Singapore. If this makes you laugh, you are not the solution, you might be infected. If this makes you grimace that Congress has declared two plus two equals Abramowich and don’t-forget-my-share-of-the-take, then you are ready to fight the pandemic of the 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Now.