National Indian Gaming Association
February 8, 2012


    Thank you for the invitation to join you again this year.

    What has brought me to support Indian gaming is not just the commerce and prosperity that it produces.  There are two more fundamental principles at stake that make this a just and noble cause.

    One is the tribal sovereignty that made the once impoverished Indian reservations islands of freedom in an ocean of anti-business regulations emanating from local, state and federal governments.

    It is not gaming that is making the tribes prosper – it is the freedom of commerce that tribal sovereignty protects. 

    The other principle is freedom of choice.  As you know, there is a strong opposition to gambling by those who believe that they’re so good at running their own lives that, gosh darn it, they’re also entitled to run everybody else’s. 

    They don’t approve of gaming so they feel entitled to deny it to all.

    I know this is a strange thing to admit to an association dedicated to the gaming industry, but I don’t gamble.  I’m sorry.  I’m not very good at it and I don’t enjoy it very much.  And I’m just too cheap.

    If it’s any consolation, I feel exactly the same way about stamp collecting.

    But that doesn’t give me the right to tell someone else who is good at it, or who does enjoy it, that they shouldn’t do it either.  And it certainly doesn’t give me a right to take government’s gun and force them not to do it.

    But it’s not just the right of individuals to make these decisions for themselves.  It is the right to compete for their business and their right to choose among competitors for those who offer the best service to them. 

    Will and Ariel Durant once asked the question, “What makes Ford a good car?”  Chevrolet. 

    Competition.  That’s what produces innovation and efficiency and excellence in any human enterprise – the fact that somebody down the street is doing the same thing.  And it is competition that makes consumers happy and loyal customers.

    I lay all this out to broach a tender subject.  As many of you know, I have been an outspoken advocate for tribal sovereignty before there was Indian gaming, and I have advocated for it for fully a quarter of a century in the California legislature and most recently in Congress. 

    It pains me to see tribe turning against tribe in attempts to deny to others these very same rights.  In 1860, Abraham Lincoln warned that “those who would deny liberty to others deserve it not for themselves.”

    These fights undermine the very principles that provide the foundation that you and I have stood upon to successfully argue to protect and extend the freedom that the reservations preserve and to protect the right to engage in peaceful commerce in competition with others in a free market.

    To abandon these principles in an attempt to obtain some temporary competitive advantage is to abandon the moral high ground that makes this cause a noble one.  And worse than that, it relegates that cause to the tawdry and unworthy realm of raw political power, where competitive advantage is not earned in the market place through merit, but rather conferred by government fiat as it picks winners among the strong and powerful and losers among the weak and voiceless. 

    I have been proud to fight by your side in state and federal government.  The only real joy I have found in politics is the chance to be part of a cause bigger than oneself and that cause can be summed up in a word, “freedom.”  And it is because of the nobility of that cause that you and I have prevailed in this fight – because it enables us to appeal above man’s baser instincts and to what Lincoln called, “The better angels of our nature.”  To traduce these principles is to begin down the road to ruin.