Late this afternoon, the official word came from the offices of Nevada Senator Harry Reid regarding the drive for federal online poker legislation: he’s pulling the plug.
With only about one week left in the 112th session of the U. S. Congress (the new Congress will be seated on January 2), Senator Reid issued a written statement regarding the proposed legislation that he had worked on with outgoing Arizona Senator Jon Kyl. “We have simply run out of time in this legislative calendar,” Senator Reid’s statement read. The current Congress only has a handful of bills that have the opportunity to pass and linking a federal measure for online poker regulation would jeopardize passage of those bills.
“I am disappointed,” Reid added in the statement, but he did offer what might be a glimmer of hope for the future of federal action. “Senator Dean Heller (Reid’s Republican partner from Nevada) and I remain committed to this issue and it will be a priority for us in the new Congress.”
While Reid, Kyl and Heller proposed to be at the forefront of moving the issue through the Senate, they were facing more opposition to the issue than they previously had thought. Reid and Heller were looking to ensure that Nevada would be the epicenter of a federal online gaming outlet (with the Nevada casinos providing the action), while Kyl, a longtime anti-gambling zealot, was looking to actually limit online gaming (the proposed Reid/Kyl bill would have virtually outlawed any other online gaming) before he retired from Congress. The push back from fellow Senators – not to mention the Governors of the individual states and Indian tribes – proved to be too much to overcome.
When the new Congress is seated come January, the opportunity for new legislation to be proposed (the Reid/Kyl bill was never introduced; Texas House of Representative’s member Joe Barton’s online poker regulatory bill will “die” with the end of this Congress and will have to be reintroduced) could very well be a short one. “Our goal is to definitely try again next year,” David Krone, the chief of staff for Senator Reid, “but Senator Reid’s feeling is that, after a while, there comes a time when you’ve lost the consensus that you’ve built. There will be a window next year, but I don’t see it going long.”
The journey of federal online poker legislation has been one fraught with starts and stops virtually throughout the entirety of this Congressional session. Although Rep. Barton introduced his bill last year, it received little attention save for two House subcommittee meetings. A vote was never taken on Rep. Barton’s bill and, as such, it never reached the floor of the House of Representatives for consideration.
The Senate did not even take up the issue of federal online poker regulation until after the U. S. Department of Justice ruled in December 2011 that the Wire Act of 1961 – the law most often used to state online gambling and poker were illegal – only applied to sports betting. This opened the floodgates for the individual states to start offering online gaming, from lottery ticket sales in Illinois to Nevada’s efforts to open an intra-state online poker network to Delaware’s passage of a full online casino gaming law.
The Reid/Kyl bill would have shut all of those operations down, just as Rep. Barton’s bill would have. While opening up online poker for American players (the players would not be allowed to play internationally), virtually all other forms of online gaming (bingo, slots, table games, lotteries, etc.) would have been banned. The Reid/Kyl bill, however, seems to have never gotten out of the gate, leading to infighting among the two Nevada senators as to who really had the best interests of their constituents (and potentially the powerful Nevada casino industry) in mind.
With the failure of federal online poker regulation for 2012, the states are now the last option before the calendar flips. Although Nevada has their regulations in place and has awarded licenses, it isn’t until the spring of 2013 that the first sites are expected to go online. California seems to be “warming the engines” to push for online poker regulation, while New Jersey is expected to make their moves on the issue of full-fledged online casinos before the New Year. Even with these options in motion, however, it will be much longer before Americans can warm up their computers for a regulated online poker world in the United States.
