Wake County Superior Court Judge Howard Manning has in effect sided with former House Speaker Jim Black, the disgraced Mecklenburg Democrat who now resides in federal prison, on the topic of video poker. Here's a link to Mark Johnson's story.
Manning -- who incidently is a Republican, though judges don't run on a partisan ballot anymore -- ruled Thursday that a 2006 law banning video poker machines in North Carolina was unconstitutional because federal law and a state agreement allow the machines on the Cherokee Indian reservation in Western North Carolina. Manning stayed his order until the state Court of Appeals rules on a lawsuit on this issue, but Manning found it was unlawful to ban video poker in one part of the state if they're legal in another part -- pretty much what Black thought.
The irony is that a federal investigation of video poker operations, and campaign contributions from the industry, led to an investigation of Black and ultimately his sentencing to federal prison for taking illegal contributions from optometrists. Black was long the video poker industry's strongest defender in the legislature, resisting Senate bills that would have banned video poker years earlier. His political committees got a lot of video poker contributions, and a lot of folks thought that arrangement was a simple retail purchase.
One reason Black said he opposed the ban was that if it was legal on the Indian reservation, it ought to be legal elsewhere. "Why are you going to discriminate against any legal business in the state?" he asked at a 2006 press conference while he was still speaker. But Black later supported the bill phasing out video poker after the legislature approved a state lottery and Gov. Mike Easley signed it into law.
