President Joe Biden’s Justice Department is urging the U.S. Supreme Court to rule for two Texas tribes in their long-standing battle with the Lone Star State over whether they can legally operate bingo casinos on their reservations.
The Tigua tribe of El Paso and the Alabama-Coushatta of East Texas have consistently lost court battles with Texas attorneys general since 1993.
A Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 1994 known as Ysleta I held that federal law forbade bingo-based games on the two reservations. The Biden administration is arguing that those decisions were incorrect and urges the High Court to reverse that error.
However, the Supreme Court has previously declined to intervene in any of the appeals from the Texas tribes. Acting Solicitor General Brian Fletcher last month wrote in a brief submitted to the justices: “That error has impaired the uniformity of a federal regulatory scheme, has uniquely disadvantaged two Indian tribes and has generated repeated litigation and substantial confusion for nearly three decades.”
The court battle centers over the Restoration Act of 1987, which created a federal trust relationship with the two tribes and the Indian Regulatory Act of 1988.
By the first act, the tribes were not allowed to offer gaming. By the second act, all tribes in the U.S. were allowed to offer gaming as long as it doesn’t violate state or federal law.
The question is which law applies to the Texas tribes.
Tiguas attorney Brant Martin wrote approvingly: “We are pleased that the solicitor general of the United States has taken the position that it has.”
The Solicitor General’s friend of the court brief increases the likelihood that the Supreme Court will consider the tribes’ case when the new session begins in October.
Texas has some of the most restrictive gaming laws in the nation and state governments have opposed gaming on tribal land for more than three decades. Current Governor Greg Abbott and the Texas delegation to Congress have also opposed a bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives that would have acknowledged the right of the tribes to offer bingo. The bill has floundered in the Senate.
