about children. The opposition was essentially trying to weaken Tribes by putting their children in the middle, which is a standard tactic for entities that are seeking to destroy Tribes.” Maverick Gaming LLC is a commercial Washington-based corporation that owns and operates 19 card rooms in the State. Maverick filed suit against the United States, the Department of Interior, Secretary Haaland, Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland, and Washington state officials, for negotiating and approving gaming compacts with 29 Indian Tribes to permit sports betting, including “geo-fenced” sports betting that permits online wagers placed and accepted on Indian lands. The State of Washington’s criminal law prohibits commercial gaming operators, like Maverick, from offering sports betting. Maverick claims that the compact provides Tribes with a “monopoly over most forms of casino-style gaming” that is inconsistent with IGRA and federal criminal laws and violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection by “irrationally and impermissibly discriminating on the basis of race and ancestry.” These attacks are decades in the making. One of the attorneys representing Brackeen and Maverick filed a lawsuit to overturn California’s Prop 5 in 1998, when California voters approved a statute initiative to enact Tribal-State gaming compacts. This same attorney served as the Justice Department’s Solicitor General from 2001-2004, during a time when DOJ filed lawsuits and developed draft legislation to amend IGRA to limit the ability of Tribal Governments to utilize class II gaming. For Indian Country, everything is at stake. If either ICWA or IGRA fall to a racially-based constitutional challenge, attacks against federal laws to preserve Tribal Government culture and religion (NAGPRA), Indian water rights, Indian lands (the Indian Reorganization Act and many others), Indian healthcare and education (IHCIA and ISDEAA), Indian housing (NAHASDA), and many more will immediately follow. As Justice Harry Blackmun, a President Nixon nominee, stated in Mancari : “If these laws, derived from historical relationships and explicitly designed to help only Indians, were deemed invidious racial discrimination, an entire Title of the United States Code (25 U. S. C.) would be effectively erased, and the solemn commitment of the Government toward the Indians would be jeopardized.” Opponents of Indian Country pin their hopes on the Court reverting to making federal Indian policy from the bench as it did in Castro-Huerta . They will ask the Court to dismiss the half century of Mancari ’s precedent and reinterpret the Constitution’s clear expression of Indian tribes as self- governing entities. Essentially, they will ask the Court “to say that the Constitution itself is racially discriminatory” as Professor Matthew Fletcher recently wrote. For these reasons, all of Indian Country is uniting to push back against these existential attacks on tribal sovereignty.
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