Home / Poker News December 2010 / Harry Reid pushing for legal online poker
Harry Reid pushing for legal online poker
Posted by: Randy Williams - Mon, 2010-12-06 11:59
Just when things looked about as bleak as possible for legal online poker in 2010, and when the prospects of any meaningful legislation in this sense seemed to drift into the distance, along comes a knight in shining armor in the unlikely person of Senate majority leader Harry Reid. Reid is not just half heartedly tossing his support behind someone else’s initiative, he looks set on pushing through his own bill, in an apparent attempt to satisfy an important segment of his supporters who have made it possible for him to retain his senate position during the November elections.
Reid’s bill aims to legalize and to tax online poker on a federal level, and it is only aimed at online poker
. Online casino gambling and sports betting would be made illegal by the law.
Reid also aims to push the bill through the Senate’s lame-duck session, or in other words: as soon as possible.
Due to the caliber of the political figure involved, the initiative has already garnered more media coverage than all similar efforts combined so far. Some of the media asssessments on the development are favorable, others are less so. They all seem to agree on the fact however that rounding out the federal budget using revenues generated by legal online poker makes decent sense.
Reid’s bill would only grant licenses to US-based brick and mortar casinos for the first 0.5 – 2 years of its enactment. Whether offshore gambling interests would be able to secure licenses following that period (during which the domination of domestic
online poker rooms is supposed to be established), is not yet clear.
Opposition to the bill came from the usual sources: rep. Spencer Bacchus and Lamar Smith were quick to condemn the move, stating that the gaping holes in the federal budget should not be patched up at the expense of the “young, weak and vulnerable”.
