"Most people, including those in the gaming industry, who have heard of the National Indian Gaming Commission ("NIGC"), assume that it regulates Indian Gaming. Even some of the Commissioners themselves believe they have this power.

They are wrong.

The misunderstanding arises from the way the modern law of Indian gaming was created.

First came court cases. While these were being fought all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court for almost a decade, Congress was involved with sometimes heated negotiations among the interested parties: the tribes, of course, but also powerful political players who wanted to limit Indian gaming. The most influential of these were members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate from Nevada.

Most observers thought the tribes would eventually lose, that the courts would rule that if a state had strict criminal restrictions on gambling, tribes would have to abide by those limits. California allowed charities to have bingo games limited to $250 maximum jackpots, so its tribes would not be permitted to offer larger prizes. So, the negotiations tended to favor the states, with a few crumbs being thrown to the tribes.

Then came the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Cabazon case in 1987. The Court ruled that under a statute passed decades earlier, Public Law 280, the question of what forms of gambling tribes could offer in most states depended upon the public policies of those states. If a state allowed charity bingo, tribes could also operate bingo. And the tribes, being sovereign governments, could self-regulate. This included the right to set their own limits. So, tribes in California could, and did, offer bingo with prizes of $500,000.

Suddenly, the entire political landscape had changed. The tribes had the upper hand in negotiations in Congress. States not only allowed charity bingo, they also had state lotteries and racetracks, and two states, New Jersey and Nevada, had casinos."

Get the Story:
I. Nelson Rose: National Indian Gaming Commission Cannot Regulate Class III Gaming (The Casino City Times 4/23)