Suckers ‘R’ Us (Editorial)

Here we go again. Yet another out-of-state company wants to get itself written, by name, into our state constitution as a protected casino monopoly. And people you’d expect to have more respect for their home state — lawyers, political consultants, economic developers — have signed on to help.

It would be bad enough to think that Arkansans would sell our state constitution to the highest bidder — but in this case, there isn’t even any bidding. The only thing that makes Arkansas Gaming & Resorts LLC (with its principal address in Branson, Missouri) and two related companies worthy of being included in our constitution is the fact that they wrote the amendment currently under consideration by the state attorney general and are prepared to pay to collect the signatures to put it on the ballot.

Can you imagine Texas or Wyoming writing the name of a private company into their state constitutions? It sounds like something only desperate suckers would even consider, yet operator after operator has concluded that Arkansas might be ripe for that kind of sell-out. (One of the amendments actually got on the general election ballot in 2000, and Arkansans were evenly split on that until its backers were charged with felony securities fraud just before the election.)

Let us be clear: Our objection to this “casino initiative” is not the casino part. An amendment that would allow the expansion of casino gambling would be a fair question to put to voters.

But the idea of creating constitutionally protected monopolies for specific companies and their investors is unsupportable. We’d feel that way even if the company actually were from Arkansas.

Eventually one of these persistent operators and their enablers-for-hire may succeed in getting voters to approve the ultimate in self-serving amendments. To prevent that, our legislature needs to propose its own amendment specifically forbidding any private organization from being named in or given any special advantage by our state constitution.