Congress passed its final bills of the year Dec. 9 and adjourned with out so much as a hint of consideration for attaching an internet gambling ban during the lame-duck session, ending a disappointing 2016 for poker legislation on a good note. Whilst there was no concrete progress, at least there was no visible damage done.
Nevertheless, there may have been damage that we just cannot see yet. I’d argue that the legacy of this past year is tied to the next. Bills in California, Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan advanced further than they ever had before, but in the first three states things ended inside a discouraging manner.
If next year sees bills pass in any of those states, then 2016 marked powerful progress around the way to legal and regulated on-line poker spreading across the country.
Or perhaps 2016 is when it all starting to fall apart – when it proved too difficult for states to push on-line gaming across the line, when Donald Trump was elected president and brought with him anti-gaming Vice President Mike Pence, together with Republican branches of Congress filled with lawmakers who got funding from anti-online gambling crusader Sheldon Adelson.
The year started with me interjecting that the third year could be the charm in working on expanding internet poker within the United states beyond the 2013 breakthrough of regulation in New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware.
That didn’t finish up being the case, but on-line poker did get passed by the New York Senate and Pennsylvania Home. That is a significant accomplishment to obtain online poker through one full legislative branch in two of the six most populous states in the nation.
However it was shocking how unprepared and unwilling their corresponding chambers were to move around the problem. My interview with New York Assemblyman Gary Pretlow in June was one of the most frustrating interviews I’ve ever done.
He said that he was in a position to pass his every day fantasy sports bill but not online poker simply because DFS is a game of ability while poker is gambling, and this is the individual who introduced the legislation to regulate online poker!
Pennsylvania appeared to be the state closest to passing on-line gaming when the year started and it seemed on its way to taking place when Rep. John Payne got his web gambling bill attached to a complete gaming expansion package that also integrated DFS and allowing video gaming terminals in airports and off-track betting parlors. The Home passed the bill and the governor worked with both branches to consist of $100 million from gaming charges in the state budget.
The Senate then put off addressing the bill till after its summer time recess. Rep. Payne, who chaired the Home Gaming Oversight Committee, told PokerNews he believed the delay was due to concerns over off-track betting parlors and not online gaming, but as soon as the Senate attempted to act on a local casino tax share issue without addressing the gambling expansion, it was clear something much more was going on.
The Home challenged the Senate to consist of online gaming and was ignored.
The roadblock in the Senate became clear when a November letter Sen. Robert Tomlinson sent his colleagues came to light. All through the push for on-line gaming in Pennsylvania, many wondered if this was going to go all of the way with out Adelson making an influence inside a state in which he has a casino.
Well, perhaps it’s just that Parx Casino has been lukewarm on on-line gaming operations in his district, but Tomlinson’s uninformed letter parroted numerous of the false claims that Adelson’s Coalition to Stop Web Gambling promotes – that on-line gaming would be a threat to kids and issue gamblers and casinos would lose money from cannibalization. Scare tactic allegations have already been disproved in New Jersey.
Poker Players Alliance Executive Director John Pappas, who frequently provides written and oral testimony at state committee hearings, took the rare step of writing an open letter responding to and disputing Tomlinson’s letter.
“Sen. Tomlinson’s letter, but also his actions more than the past year, have really been all about attempting to stymie web gaming legislation,” Pappas said. “We were no longer going to sit by silently as he continued to put forward false claims, even when he had people testify before him that these points were false. It’s beautiful to determine, so we felt compelled to respond.”
Pappas believes the votes were there for on-line poker to pass in Pennsylvania this year, but Senate leadership did not allow the vote to take location.
“The frustrating thing for me is the Senator [Tomlinson] and others say there’s not votes for it,” Pappas said. “Well, let’s put it to get a vote and discover. We believe there were votes for it, especially when it was tied with the nearby share tax; the votes were definitely there. We’re disappointed that the Senate didn’t act.”
As frustrating because the near misses were in Pennsylvania and New York, California is where probably the most harm was done in 2016.
Entering the year, it already seemed as although California had dropped behind Pennsylvania as the subsequent state anticipated to regulate online poker due to a standoff in between tribal gaming interests in the state. Nevertheless, early within the year, Assemblyman Adam Gray seemed to resolve certainly one of the two main roadblocks for passage by working out a deal for the horse racing business to take a substantial annual stipend in return for providing up its correct to operate an online poker website.
The impact of having the horse racing on board was shown in April when the Assembly Governmental Organization Committee passed the bill unanimously. The business paraded towards the mic people ranging from breeders and jockeys to owners, teamsters and workers, numerous of them local constituents who all exalted the legislation.
“The enthusiasm the horse racing business brought to this problem in the final year is what brought it closer than ever,” Pappas stated.
The coalition of support for on-line poker in California was bigger than ever. All of a sudden there was optimism that, after almost a decade, the Golden State was prepared to pass an online poker bill. The only holdup was 1 tribal group’s insistence that PokerStars be legislatively precluded from operating within the state due to its previous operations during a gray period of legality.
The “bad actor” problem had seemed to be waning in 2015 following PokerStars, now owned by Canadian business Amaya Gaming, gained approval from New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement. But legal troubles for Amaya reinvigorated the resolve from the eight-tribe coalition led by Pechanga and Agua Caliente to call for PokerStars’ exclusion.
That was not going to be acceptable to Morongo and San Manuel, the potent tribes who have partnered with PokerStars along with three major Los Angeles-area card rooms, who only asked for PokerStars’ suitability to become determined by regulators instead of who has probably the most political influence over legislators.
The answer to that query was told in an ugly finish towards the session – to no one. In a last-ditch work to pass the bill, Gray added to his bill a hard five-year ban for PokerStars in order to get the Pechanga coalition’s assistance. His Chief of Employees, Trent Hager, told the Los Angeles Times this amendment ought to safe the needed two-thirds vote in the Assembly.
It didn’t. Rather, things turned ugly with Gray and Hager experiencing personal attacks in the media and the legislation by no means coming to a vote.
The coalitions have equal power to block a bill and so the stalemate persists. But now the sides are much more dug in. Gray alienated some stakeholders with his maneuver and stakeholders angered lawmakers with their techniques.
Pappas pointed out that, although the state-by-state path of on-line poker failed to advance as soon as once more, there are now hundreds of lawmakers who have gone on record in assistance of regulating internet gaming in states across the country via votes and co-sponsorship of bills.
“It is disappointing that we haven’t had more success at the state level,” Pappas admitted. “It’s indicative of trying to pass controversial, difficult-to-understand legislation. We do not view it as controversial, as well as your readers aren’t going to view it as controversial, but this is about gaming and the web, often confusing and tough subjects for lawmakers. Add in that you will find other competing forces out there that don’t want this to occur, and we’ve to fight not just the preconceived notions of lawmakers, but opponents prepared to say whatever they wish to shut it down.”
It’s a prime chance missed for online gaming regulation to block Adelson’s federal efforts at a ban by gaining a stronghold in a prominent state without the reputation of being a gaming outlier.
This gave Adelson an opening to call in favors from all of the elected officials he supported in November to sneak his Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA) legislation to ban on-line gaming into certainly one of the typical combo bills that come out of the lame-duck session, but he failed in surprisingly quiet fashion.
“There were some rumors that RAWA could be integrated, but I think the lobbying group and others kind of made some noise about that and it quickly got place to bed,” Pappas stated. “I don’t believe they were prepared take on another controversial issue. Congress went away and RAWA died with whimper.”