Nonsense.
Senator Tom McClintock
Date: August 27, 1998
Publication Type: Speech or StatementIt was Tocqueville who said that it is the spirit of the law – not the form – that drive great events. So let us talk of the spirit of tribal sovereignty. We are all aware of the litany of broken promises, broken treaties, broken hearts and broken bodies that trace the history of the American and Californian Indian. Indian reservations were often chosen from among the least attractive land on this continent. Deserts, remote mountains – as far away from our sight, thoughts and conscience as geography permitted. It was little sacrifice on our part – as a society – to recognize the tribes as sovereign nations. It allowed us the luxury to practice benign neglect. And so the common denominator on these lands was simple and abject poverty.
Around Christmas time a few years ago, I visited with some of the tribal leaders in southern California. We had children about the same age, so we were talking about Christmas shopping, and favorite Christmases. And he told me about his favorite Christmas – one that has shone bright in his memory through all these years. One Christmas morning, under the tattered family Christmas tree was the greatest gift he had ever imagined. It literally gave him a whole new sense of pride and self worth and childhood joy. Under the Christmas tree was a brand new bicycle…seat. And his face lit up even then as he described it in the most minute detail. And then he said, you know, I realize how much my parents struggled – now that I can afford to buy my children a brand new bicycle.
Springing up on these remote reservations in the last few years is the indomitable spirit of the American Indian. Way out on these remote reservations, the tiny scrap of liberty they retained through tribal sovereignty has allowed them to kindle an economic recovery through recreational gaming.
But that embryo of enterprise now has grown into a little tiny mouse of competition to the giant casinos in Nevada. So they have come to this legislature to shut down the tribes. They do so with this sham compact – negotiated with a tribe that has no gaming enterprise and that is happy to accept severe restrictions on others in exchange for an unearned and undeserved share of the profits of the labors of others. They were subsequently joined by tribes coerced with threats of economic ruin or jail. Things haven’t changed very much in California in the last hundred years. We were perfectly satisfied to leave the Indians alone when they suffered silently in their isolation and poverty. But now that they are beginning to succeed and beginning to compete, we want to deny their sovereignty and strangle them.
My second point is one of simple liberty. The activity on these establishments is voluntary, it is consensual, it is contractual. I am always amazed at those in government who feel they are so good at running their own lives that they feel entitled to run everybody else’s. What grown-up adults in a free society want to do with their own time and their own money is their own business – not ours.
The old shibboleth of cheating and organized crime as been raised. The fact is that the most jealous guardian of a casino’s reputation is the casino itself. The mere wisp of a rumor of cheating or unfair practice sends customers flocking to competing establishments. And let me remind the members that the biggest drug laundering scheme in American history occurred right here in California, when a former Director of the Department of Finance laundered millions of drug cartel dollars not through a casino – but through a popular fast food franchise. If the sponsors were really serious about their concerns – they would be sponsoring a fast food compact.
The facts are quite simple. The Indians have developed a way to make the flinty, forsaken, isolated land to which they were banished, provide a livelihood, made possible by the one thing we left them after we had taken away everything else – their liberty. We are now acting to take away that liberty.
We are so good at condemning the decisions of our fathers when it comes to mistakes they made under the pressure of world war. Vote for this if you want – but ponder what will be said by your children in this chamber a generation hence. And you will then rightly know the true meaning of shame.