Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been working with a local Native American tribe in Massachusetts to push through authorization for a new casino on federal land — a casino that local Massachusetts residents, and the federal government, have repeatedly said they don’t want.
But the bill to build the casino died in the senate late last year, and now, it seems, some of Warren’s fellow Democrats may be to blame.
The Washington Times reports that the bill, which would have allowed the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe to build a “$1 billion resort in Taunton, Massachusetts,” never made it to the senate floor, thanks to the efforts of the two Democratic senators from Rhode Island, Sheldon Whitehouse and Jack Reed, who pleaded with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to let the bill die in committee.
The bill reappeared in the House last week, this time sponsored by Reps. William Keating and Joe Kennedy III, both Massachusetts Democrats.
The bill overrides a federal court’s decision not to award the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe around 300 acres to build the billion-dollar tribal casino, based on rules granting tribal land only to those tribes recognized in an early-20th century federal agreement. The Mashpee Wampanoag received federal recognition, the Times reports, in 2007. – READ MORE