NOTE: This diary will simultaneously publish to and inaugurate the new group, DK Gambling Law Forum, discussed more fully in this other diary.
Republican Congressman Joe Barton of Texas has dropped into the House hopper and had assigned to his own committee, and others, the Internet Gambling Prohibition, Poker Consumer Protection, and Strengthening UIGEA Act of 2011, you know the well known and easily pronounced (warning, PDF)
IGPPCPSUIGEAA of 2011. I haven't read the entire 101 page bill yet in studious detail, but I've been through it and found a few of the wooly boogers, as we used to say when I did this kind of thing at a state capitol many years ago.
First, though, a few thoughts on how this bill popped up in the House.
At first I was shocked to see who the GOP sponsor was, the grotesquely anti-environment, anthropogenic climate change denier, Smokey Joe Barton of Texas. I had been Delay-mandered into Smokey Joe's 6th District of Texas, back before I relocated to my native Midwestern home state, and I know this jerk pretty well. Then I realized that the bill hands control of internet gaming to the Secretary of Commerce acting through fifty distinct state internet gaming regulatory schemes. Barton chairs the Energy and Commerce Committee. If the GOP is on board with this bill, then Barton is the appropriate sponsor as the chair of the principally interested committee, Energy and Commerce.
But what is this I see? Barney Frank is a co-sponsor, and John Conyers, and Linda Sanchez and other prominent Democrats are, too, along with Republicans from as far out there are Ron Paul and Peter King! It looks like the fix is in on this thing, at least in the house, and the ecumenicalism, if you will, of the co-sponsors dazzles, to say the very least. With Smokey Joe calling in markers from Republicans and all kinds of prominent Democrats on board, you have to figure that this thing is a go in the House. That is why the diary title calls this move over the top, which in poker is a re-raise, meant to preempt the betting and force the opposition to fold. Going over the top usually works.
Yet look how quietly they rolled out this apparent triumph of House bipartisanship (something that I've long filed away with unicorns), on a Friday, and with the catchy name, IGPPCPSUIGEAA, which, if you try to sound it out, sounds lot like vomiting. The proposal received no mention on Daily Kos at all and damned little elsewhere. They didn't even graft the word "JOBS" onto it somehow, even though there is a jobs angle in the bill, in a fanciful, though possibly accurate, speculation about the effect of the law if enacted:
Such a program would create a new industry within the United States creating thousands of jobs and substantial tax revenue for Federal and State governments.
Just what does the House have in mind for Americans who gamble on the internet, most of them now illegally? The title of the bill says most of it: "To establish a program for State licensing of Internet poker, and for other purposes." This is done by providing a pathway for state by state licensing, or not, of internet poker, enabling states to create a revenue stream from something they now make nothing from. The Commerce Department takes a taste, of course, through a fee based, non tax revenue stream to the Federal Treasury called the "Internet Poker Oversight Fund". The act may very well allow the off-shore internet poker industry to be moved on-shore for U.S. gamblers as well as subject them to state sin taxes. The only legal internet poker will be state regulated internet poker, possibly even state run internet poker.
In poker, one does not compete against the house as in most other gambling games, but only against other players. Where a house provides a dealer and a table, etc. as in a casino, brick and mortar or on-line, the house takes a little out of every pot. This is called a rake. The rake is about to go up for U.S. internet poker players.
That's not the only wooly booger I found. The bill is a breathtakingly bold and unprecedented incursion into state regulation of gambling, a traditional state police power, a governmental power not possessed by the federal government except to a limited manner in relation to its own lands and property and specifically federal interests. So, Tea Partyer's heads should explode about this federal usurpation. Here's one example: Under HR 2366, poker is defined nationally, for the first time ever, as a game of skill, not a game of chance, at least for those states participating in the regulatory scheme.
Poker is distinct from the class of games of chance traditionally defined as gambling in that, players compete against each other, and not the person or entity hosting the game (sometimes called ‘‘the house’’), and that over any significant interval, the outcome of a poker game is predominantly determined by the skill of the participants.
Before this law (if it passes) this was a not the law applicable to nearly half the country, where even social poker is outlawed.
Apparently Smokey Joe is serious about this bill. I hear tell he likes to play poker and he may even have Harry Reid's ear over in the Senate. But, given the very idea of where poker playing appears on the portrait of America's culture wars, it seems to be an odd thing for Republicans to have got behind. I wonder if American casino operators are looking to get into the internet poker business and this is their vehicle. They have a lot of money, which means a lot of friends on both sides of the aisle. This promises to be an interesting piece of legislation to follow.