The Alabama gambling debate, stuck in reruns

  The gambling debate comes back to the Alabama Legislature every year or two, like a 40- or 50-year-old rerun of a sitcom.

  The characters, all performing on a tiny, windowless set, return from the previous adventure to perform a variation on the story we’ve seen countless times before.

  A plan is made. The plan goes awry. The players make some quips and perform a few pratfalls.

  Toward the end of the show, there’s a beat where the hijinks halt, the piano and strings come up on the soundtrack, and the actors suddenly try to tie the narrative to a social concern or some issue in the news.

  Then, suddenly, the story ends. The conflicts get put aside; the status quo is restored. And nothing meaningful changes.

  This was the 2024 gambling debate. It was a little different from the one in 2021, or 2016, or 2010, or 1999. But it had most of the original cast and followed the same beats.

  One legislative chamber passes a gambling bill. Minority Democrats get it over the line. The Alabama Farmers Federation scowls. GOP leaders in the other chamber can’t or won’t find a consensus in their caucus. The Poarch Band of Creek Indians and the state’s dog tracks are on the same page, and then they aren’t. The proposal gets rejected or gutted. There’s a last-minute scramble to save something as the session dies. It fails. Roll credits.

  “Family Ties,” only the Keatons spend a half-hour each week yelling about a big money poker game in their basement.

  And it’s hard to see how we ever escape this cycle.

  Alabama’s government is not nimble. That’s by design.

  A lottery may be popular. Legislators tried to pull that provision out of the gambling wreck last week because they know they’re going to hear complaints about a lack of a lottery for the next nine months.

  But Goat Hill is not meant to respond to popular will.  Our state constitution, framed to keep Alabama under the thumbs of white elites, gives state government a single purpose: maintaining the status quo. Or more specifically, keeping the powerful happy and the rest of us in line.

  And for now, the state’s status quo on gambling satisfies our leaders and the powerful entities around them.

  I’m not here to make the case for gambling. As public policy, I think it’s terrible. Gambling is effectively another regressive tax in a state that already expects those least able to pay to fund a government habitually uninterested in their concerns.

  But it’s perfectly reasonable to point out that all our neighbors have lotteries and that Alabamians are going across the border, buying lottery tickets, and helping other states‘ bottom lines.

  And the current status quo is, to put it mildly, sub-optimal. It doesn’t give lawmakers the tax revenue they could have. Or gambling interests all the profit they could claim.

  It leaves mostly-Black communities that have approved gambling at the mercy of a mostly-white Republican judiciary that narrowed the results of those local elections, often on dubious grounds.

  But for the entities closest to the issue, none of this presents a threat or a need.

  The Poarch Band of Creek Indians, a federally recognized tribe that runs casinos in Atmore, Montgomery, and Wetumpka, offers the only gambling in Alabama that’s totally free of legal impediments. They’re doing well.

  Nothing the legislature offered the Poarch Band this year could convince them to sign off on another approach. In fact, what they eventually settled on turned the Poarch Band into strong opponents.

  Dog tracks, often big employers in rural districts, face legal uncertainty. But Republicans who run the legislature generally don’t represent districts with dog tracks. They have no political need to settle that issue.

  And whatever your feelings about a lottery, there’s nothing forcing legislators to create one. The budgets are in good shape. Any program lawmakers want to fund can be paid for out of existing revenues (or borrowing).

  Even if most people support a vote on a lottery, the vast majority of Republican incumbents are in safe GOP districts. You might be angry about the gambling failure. Gerrymandering protects lawmakers from your fury. They worry more about gambling opponents like the Alabama Farmers Federation and the Alabama Policy Institute, both influential in conservative circles.

  So why does the gambling issue come back? There’s too much legal uncertainty — and too much money at stake — to ignore it.

  And when we take up the issue again, the package developed this year by Reps. Chris Blackshear (R-Smiths Station) and Andy Whitt  (R-Harvest) — itself derived from a 2021 measure backed by then-Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh (R-Anniston) — will be as good a model as any for proponents.

  But can public will and public need actually move the issue forward? In 2016, we had popular support for gambling and a General Fund budget that desperately needed the revenue. It still wasn’t enough.

  So the Alabama gambling debate stays in reruns. As long as the current gambling landscape doesn’t threaten the powers that be, we’ll always know how the latest episode is going to end.

  About the author: Brian Lyman is the editor of Alabama Reflector. He has covered Alabama politics since 2006 and worked at the Montgomery Advertiser, the Press-Register, and The Anniston Star. A 2024 Pulitzer finalist for Commentary, his work has also won awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Alabama Press Association, and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights.

  This article was published by Alabama Reflector.