The poker community has been waiting with bated breath for the passage of online poker legislation in the halls of Congress. As the clock ticks down to the end of the latest incarnation of the Senate and the House of Representatives, the leaders of said legislation are not only downplaying their expectations regarding passage but also broadcasting such pessimistic views to a mainstream outlet.
Writers Juliana Gruenwald and Dan Friedman of the National Journal report in an article entitled “Online Gambling Bill Not A Good Bet” that the two main players for online poker legislation in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and a retiring Jon Kyl of Arizona, are now “less optimistic” about moving their proposed bill through the “lame duck” session of Congress. As the poker world well knows, Reid and Kyl reached an agreement on a proposed (but still unintroduced) piece of legislature this summer that would open up the online poker industry in the United States but would essentially ban any other form of online casino gaming. After first expressing their confidence that the bill would pass, both Senators are now backtracking from that stance.
According to the National Journal writers, Sen. Reid stated on Wednesday that the bill “doesn’t have a path forward right now, but we’re working on it.” Sen. Kyl takes that pessimism a bit further in his comments to the Journal, stating that pushing the bill isn’t “sequestration and the fiscal cliff (or) a defense bill…so it would be hard” to get something done during the “lame duck” session.
Both men have their particular reasons for passage of federal regulation of not only online poker but also online gaming overall. Kyl, a longtime staunch anti-online gaming proponent, is retiring with the end of this current Congress. As a way of cementing his legacy, Kyl is looking not to open up the United States for online gaming, but to clamp down on its spread. The bill that he and Reid have concocted would give Americans the right to play online poker, but it would virtually ban any other sort of online gaming in the country, something that works into Kyl’s wheelhouse.
Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, has to come through for some of his biggest supporters. The Nevada casino industry has backed him throughout his political career and passage of some sort of online poker bill would be a “return on investment,” so to speak, from Reid to those powerful backers. Without the passage of the bill, Reid would not only look bad to the industry but also would leave online gaming in the United States a new “Wild West,” with individual states left to create their own laws on the issue.
The Nevada casino industry also has something on the line. Live poker is actually not very profitable in a casino, so the industry is willing to let the federal government regulate it while being able to use it to increase potential foot traffic to its properties across the U. S. The potential for the individual states to operate online poker sites – or, in the view of the Nevada gaming industry, full online casinos – could potentially cut into the gaming revenues in the Silver State.
Battle lines are drawn on each side of the issue. The Indian gaming consortiums and the National Governors Association have both come down in opposition to any federal action on online poker, while the Poker Players Alliance (with some reservations) and the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) support the federal government action. This doesn’t even get into the actual members of Congress, who waver on both sides of the complicated issue.
Over the next month, the question of online poker in the United States will be played out. The proposed Reid/Kyl bill – and its partner bill from Rep. Joe Barton in the House – will be the focus of many in the online poker world, but it will be a tough haul. Unlikely to be passed as a “stand alone” bill, the only possibility for federal regulation of the industry in this current Congress is attaching the proposal to a “must pass” piece of legislation – exactly how the law that started it all, the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act (UIGEA), was passed in 2006.
