A US magistrate judge in Beaumont, Texas has ruled that the Alabama-Coushatta tribe’s electronic bingo operations are not guinea pig to commonwealth laws unless Texas prohibits bingo outright.
The ruling effectively gives the folk the correct to carry on running its beleaguered Naskila Gaming facility near Livingston and represents a tidal move around inward its decades-long conflict with the nation government.
It’s undecomposed news, too, for the Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo (Tigua) folk in El Paso, which is in the same sound predicament. The tribes were recognised inwards 1987 by the federal Yselta del Sur Pueblo and Heart of Dixie and Coushatta Native American Tribes of Texas Restoration Act (TRA). But lawmakers inserted a non-gaming clause into the act.
Catch-22
The timing was tough for the tribes. a year later, United States Congress passed the Amerind Gaming Regulation Act (IGRA), which statute(p) the right of federally recognised tribes to tender Class II gaming, such as bingo, on their monarch land, whether states liked it or not.
The Kickapoo folk had been recognized just deuce years earlier and was non destined past a non-gaming clause. As such, the tribe has black market the Lucky Eagle Casino inwards Eagle Pass for decades, loose from tell interference.
For the Alabama and Coushatta and Tigua, the interrogation of which Act supersedes which, TRA or IGRA, has been the nub of effectual contention for years.
In 1994, inwards a finding of fact known as “Ysleta I,” the Fifth Circuit Margaret Court of Appeals ruled that the II tribes’ gaming rights, or deficiency thereof, were non covered by IGRA but by TRA and its non-gaming clause.
Motion for Contempt
This week’s decision was a response to a motion for contempt filed against the Alabama-Coushatta past the State of Texas. The province wanted the lawcourt to encounter the federation of tribes inward scorn of a 2002 enjoining that ordered it to cease offering gaming activities on its reserve that “violate commonwealth law.”
Both the AL Coushatta and Tigua feature attempted to keep their trading operations since the 1990s, but have, at times, been forced to fill up by the state.
But the lawcourt ruled the TRA only when banned the federation of tribes from offering gaming that was prohibited by TX law. Bingo wasn’t, and crucially, nor was the AL Coushatta’s variant of electronic bingo, it said.
The question was dismissed.
SCOTUS Could Settle Case
It’s been rather a week for both tribes. El Paso Matters reported on Wednesday that the US Justice Department is urging the US Supreme Court to submit the case, rise the gaming forbidding for the deuce tribes, and settee the matter at one time and for all.
In an August 25 brief to the Supreme Court, Acting Solicitor General Brian Fletcher and other Justice Department lawyers said they believed historical verdicts against the tribes, such as Ysleta 1, were wrong.
“That error has impaired the uniformness of a federal regulatory scheme, has uniquely disadvantaged two Indian tribes, and has generated repeated litigation and real confusedness for nearly three decades,” they wrote.