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California’s tribal casinos won a key vote on a gambling bill earlier this month after showering members of an obscure legislative committee with more than $1 million in campaign donations since the start of last year.That included funneling $92,500 in campaign donations to key members of the committee in the weeks before the vote.The tribes’ competitors, private card rooms, see the legislation as an existential threat both to their businesses and to city budgets across the state. But the card clubs lost the vote despite giving members of the committee nearly $393,000 in campaign donations over the past year and a half.
They did get support from the committee’s chairperson, who received the largest share of the card rooms’ cash.
Her opposition wasn’t enough to kill the bill, which needed 12 of the 22 members of the Assembly Governmental Organization Committee to pass. In the end, Senate Bill 549 passed with 15 “aye” votes including two from legislators who unexpectedly broke with local governments in their districts, and one from a legislator who was temporarily placed on the committee to fill in for an absent member.
It is illegal for legislators to pledge a vote in response to a cash contribution. Members of the committee told CalMatters the influx of gambling money to their campaigns didn’t influence their decisions.
But the fact that two influential interest groups showered committee members with so much money in the lead up to a key vote suggests spending big makes a big difference, and the public should assume it does, said Sean McMorris, the transparency, ethics and accountability program manager for California Common Cause.
“No politician is ever going to tell you that money affects their vote, but the public isn’t stupid,” McMorris said. “It’s pretty darn suspicious that most of them voted based on where they got the most money from.”
The vote also shows why the Governmental Organization Committee is known as a “juice committee,” which typically considers high-stakes legislation for businesses likely to try and influence the vote by donating to committee members. The committee has twice as many members as most legislative committees, and it provides the leaders who make committee assignments with a way to reward political allies.
“That’s why they’re called ‘juice committees,’ so you can squeeze the money out,” said Stacy Fisher, a former political scientist who studied juice committees as a professor at University of Nevada, Reno.
High-dollar gambling fight
For the lawmakers on the G.O. Committee, as it’s commonly called, there are few issues as juicy as this gambling dispute. The fight has become one of the most expensive political battles in California. Combined, the competing gambling interests have donated at least $1.4 million to the committee’s members since 2023.
It’s been part of a years-long lobbying blitz. Last year, one card room alone, Hawaiian Gardens Casino, spent $9 million on lobbying – the second most any group spent to influence state policy. Only the international oil giant Chevron spent more.Meanwhile, both sides spent a combined $176 million on a failed, tribal-sponsored sports betting initiative in 2022 that included a provision that would have allowed the tribes to sue card rooms.
The tribes, however, outspent their rivals on the initiative three-to-one, nearly the same ratio they outspent the gambling halls in the months before the G.O. Committee voted to advance the measure.
The tribes and card rooms have been fighting ever since voters in 2000 approved an initiative that gave tribes the right to negotiate compacts with the state to host certain house-banked, Las Vegas-style gambling on their lands.
The tribes argue that the state’s 80 or so privately-owned gambling halls have been cutting into their exclusive gambling rights by illegally offering games such as blackjack, baccarat and pai gow poker. By doing so, the tribes contend, the card rooms have stolen hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue from historically disenfranchised tribal communities across California.
They want to sue the card rooms for allegedly breaking the law. But because the tribes are sovereign governments, California courts have found they lack the legal standing to take their business competitors to court. Senate Bill 549, authored by Fullerton Democrat Sen. Josh Newman and 20 bipartisan coauthors, would give tribes a brief window to file a case.