The public's gorge has begun to rise at the morally corrupting spread of gambling in America.
Connecticut's Senate firmly rejected the bid by a phony aboriginal tribe to extend its glitzy casino empire beyond the confines of its "reservation." And in referendums from Massa-chusetts to Washington state, voters turned down get-rich-quick schemes of the gambling lobby.In the nation's capital, the movement to stop state-sponsored gambling has put forward legislation creating a bipartisan commission to study the wave of gambling. If people in their localities knew the experience of others gulled by gamblers into dreams of painless taxation, the immoral wave might recede.
In the House, Virginia Republican Frank Wolf's commission bill is in the hands of Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde. This responsive "old bull" was astounded at the groundswell against gambling's spread; conservatives see lotteries and casinos as immoral public policy, and liberals see them as a whopping tax on the poor.
Though they cannot stop the momentum toward a national study, casino operators have been trying to gut the bill and rig the commission, using American Indians as a front.
To block examination of gambling's corruption and political payoffs, they began with Rep. Sonny Bono, next to Newt Gingrich the most potent Republican fund-raiser in Congress, who has about 500 members of the Agua Caliente tribe voting in his Palm Springs, Calif., district.
With the help of Massachusetts liberal Barney Frank, a Judiciary member in thrall to Indian casino interests, Bono passed along casino-generated amendments that would stop the commission from looking into any illegal gambling or the computerized type that hooks teenagers.
A Bono amendment especially important to the crapshooting crowd (represented by Nevada lobbyist and former Republican national chairman Frank Fahrenkopf) would have deleted the provision "to make an assessment and review of the political contributions and influence of gambling businesses and promoters on the development of public policy regulating gambling."
But then a sand-roots Traditional Values Coalition in Bono's district attracted the attention of The Desert Sun. Suddenly the congressman abandoned the casino interests and withdrew all his amendments. Morality discovered its muscle.
Thwarted for the time being by the good citizens of Bono's district, the ripoff artists who call themselves "the gaming industry" used money and connections to take the offensive on another front.
Nevada's Richard Bryan, the Senate's big ethicist, slipped a provision in a telecommunications bill to remove restrictions on gambling advertising - thereby helping hard-sell this addiction.