Early on in the Koch mess, the rumors and mumbling started; the “inappropriate relationship” between Senator Koch and the “unnamed male staffer” was the symptom, not the disease.  More to the point, it may have served as a facile, sensational, headline-grabbing pretext for a much deeper conflict in the GOP – a conflict driven by money, by ideological rifts within the GOP on a third-tier issue, and by their influence on key figures in the MNGOP, up and down the food chain.

The issue is gambling – an issue that matters not an iota to the vast majority of Minnesotans, other than as the odd bit of recreation.  But it’s where Big Business and Big Morals butt heads.

And Big Tribes.

There are really three sides to this battle:

1. The Tribes, who by dint of Rudy Perpich’s compact legalizing reservation casino gambling compact in 1989 have an almost-complete legal monopoly on legal non-charitable, non-pari-mutuel  gambling in Minnesota.
2. The Anti-Gambling Crowd, the variety of social conservative groups that oppose all gambling – certainly any expansion of the status quo.  Among others, the party’s official platform in theory puts the Minnesota GOP in this camp.
3. The “Racino”, Canterbury, The Block E Casino and other non-tribal gambling proposals.  This is any and all combinations of non-tribal gambling, including expansions of gambling at Canterbury Downs.

(Here’s a handy history of gambling legislation in Minnesota).

All three groups pour money into the issue – into lobbyists, PR, campaigning, and all the other things that money buys in politics.

And the three groups form an uneasy troika.  The Tribes want their monopoly, and see Racino and further expansion of Canterbury Downs as a threat to their long-term…well, if not “livelihood”, at least a good chunk of their prosperity.   The various non-tribal interests, Racino and the rest, pay good money to get their views across to legislators.

And like the Troika in the old Soviet Union, politics always pit two of those groups against the other.  In this case, the anti-gambling forces and the tribes have united against “Racino” and the other non-tribal proposals to stymie any further expansions of non-tribal gambling and, from the tribes’ perspective, erosions to their very profitable status quo.

(And don’t get holier-than-thou, DFLers – the tribes are the second-biggest donor to the DFL and its candidates, year-in, year-out, behind only the Teachers’ Union (and, some years, even beating the teachers out for the top spot).

Sarah Janecek, whose blog is the most essential new blog in Minnesota this year, is covering the entire flap.  Over the next week or so, I’m going to look at some of Sarah’s coverage of this story.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, December 27th, 2011 at 7:00 am and is filed under MNGOP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.