On Sunday, Sept. 28, the New York Times ran a front-page story with the headline, "For McCain and Team, a Host of Ties to Gambling."

Steve is the lead quote for the story:

"One of the founding fathers of Indian gaming" is what Steven Light, a University of North Dakota professor and a leading Indian gambling expert, called Mr. McCain.”

Steve was referring, of course, to McCain's role as one of the original architects of the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. How one interprets the story of McCain’s subsequent links to the gambling industry as a whole depends in part on how it’s depicted the Times story and in much larger part on the frame through which one views Indian gaming, commercial casino interests, Jack Abramoff, and so forth.

More recently, McCain has questioned the rapid growth of the Indian gaming industry and called for legal reform to place greater state and federal controls on tribal gaming. We examined McCain's and others' calls for legal and political reform, and offered alternative reforms, in our 2006 article in the Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law ("How Congress Can and Should 'Fix' the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act: Recommendations for Law and Policy Reform," 13 Va. J.Soc. Pol'y & the L. pp. 396-473). The article was an outgrowth of the concrete recommendations we made in the final chapter of our first book, "Indian Gaming and Tribal Sovereignty: The Casino Compromise" (2005), and was inspired by our testimony before the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in 2005, when McCain was chair of the Committee.

Read more:
Jo Becker and Don Van Natta, Jr., For McCain and Team, a Host of Ties to Gambling New York Times, September 28, 2008, at 1.