The lawsuit by Washington-based Maverick Gaming challenging the exclusive right of the state’s tribes to offer sports betting is widely expected to ultimately end up on the docket of the U.S. Supreme Court. Maverick owns about half of the commercial casinos in the Evergreen State.
The opposing opinions couldn’t be farther apart. Tribes contend that the lawsuit attacks their sovereignty and ability to make money to serve their members and to provide services such as education, housing, eldercare and welfare.
Maverick CEO Eric Persson, who is a member of the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe of Washington, says that the law granting exclusivity on sports betting to tribes is unfair and discriminates in a way that violates the U.S. Constitution.
Maverick Gaming, LLC v. United States, et al. challenges the 2020 law that limits sports betting to tribal casinos on tribal lands. Per court filings, it alleges that the law created a “discriminatory tribal gaming monopoly.”
Underscore interviewed Daniel Lewerenz, assistant law professor at the University of North Dakota and lawyer with the Native American Rights Fund. He worries that the lawsuit will denigrate tribes as “private associations of people with a common racial ancestry,” instead of sovereign nations.
He added, “If that happens, then it’s hard to understand why they would have any governing power, any political power.”
Maverick Gaming has 31 casinos in Colorado, Nevada and Washington, although most of them (about 20) are moderately sized casinos with bars and restaurants and a dozen tables in Washington. They have no slot machines, which are reserved to tribal casinos. Persson says he supports tribal sovereignty, but argues that the exclusive right to offer a specific form of gaming is unfair.
He told Fox News, “What that means is on a Saturday or Sunday, when football is going, one less reason to be in a card room, one more reason to be in a tribal facility. And we don’t think that’s fair.”
He added, “People like to throw out adjectives that sound scary, but at the end of the day, the tribes are sovereign nations and this is about sports betting,” he said. “This is about not letting tribes have a monopoly on sports betting in the state of Washington.”
It’s also about jobs. He notes that being able to offer sports betting would create more than 600 jobs that pay at least $75,000 per year.
Although Persson is a member of the Shoalwater Tribe, that tribe’s CFO Larry Kerns argues that his lawsuit threatens the tribe’s ability to provide governmental services.
Kerns told Underscore, “Gaming funds basically everything.” He added, “Without it, we’d have to cut our programs by about 70 percent.” It is also using casino profits to buy back some of its original homeland, needed since some of its current reservation is being flooded.
Litigators often brag of taking their cases “all the way to the Supreme Court,” but Persson appears serious about that.
“There’s zero circumstances in which I’d settle,” he told an interviewer on Fox News. He added, “I have the resources to go all the way, and so do they. So there’s going to be a battle. We’re gonna have a lot of fun, and I’m going to win. That’s what makes it fun.”
When the Washington legislature took up legalizing sports betting two years after the Supreme Court lifted the ban, it only briefly considered opening it up to commercial casinos. Senator Curtis King told Fox News that tribes “have a lot of clout in our legislature,” adding, “They were able to stop that bill from moving forward.”
The allegations in Persson’s lawsuit pushes a lot of buttons, especially its assertion that tribal exclusivity violates the Constitution’s equal protection clause by “irrationally and impermissibly discriminating on the basis of race and ancestry.”
Rebecca George, executive director of the Washington Indian Gaming Commission calls this “offensive” and told Fox News, “This is trying to make a mockery of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.” She continued, “Indian gaming is doing what it intended to do, and that is to help pull people out of poverty.”
As noted earlier, Persson is aiming to get a milestone decision from the Supreme Court. ”We believe when we get to the Supreme Court, we’re going to win,” he told Fox News.
George responded: “Do I think this lawsuit has a chance? I don’t think so,” adding, “Do I think that they will appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court and that we will spend a lot of money fighting it? Yes.”
Meanwhile the Washington tribes are trying to head the lawsuit off at the pass by filing a motion with a federal judge to dismiss it as an attack on tribal rights.
