Home / Poker News January 2010 / John Kyl - a bump in the road for online poker?
John Kyl - a bump in the road for online poker?
Posted by: James Carter. - Wed, 2010-01-20 07:54
For those addicted to online
poker news outlets, and receiving the majority of their daily poker information dose from such sources, it is often easy to forget that online poker and online gambling have numerous enemies out there and that some of these enemies are pretty darn powerful too.
We always read about and discuss the positive stuff, like the 6-month postponement of the UIGEA’s enforcement – that was great news. Not everyone was delighted about it though. Take John Kyl, the Republican Senator from Arizona, the Senate’s Minority Whip, who has been a long time opponent of legal
online poker and gambling in the US.
Kyl was an instrumental figure in the concoction of the now infamous 2006 UIGEA, and he’d attempted to prevent companies from offering online poker and gambling services to the US public back in 1998 too.
In the wake of the 6-month breathing space granted by Treasury Secretary Timonthy Geithner on December 1st 2009, Kyl was obviously outraged. The moment for him to strike has arrived now apparently, as he decided to exact some revenge on Geithner by blocking Treasury Nominees from taking office.
These nominees were appointed by the President himself, they have the overwhelming approval of the Senate and they’re supposed to fill key positions meant to deal with international finance and tax policy.
This is obviously a very efficient way to send Geithner a message about the potential consequences of his support of legal online gambling and poker, but it is one that may yet backfire.
The public opinion will be the judge of whether or not Kyl’s gesture is a petty one, at a time when pretty much everything is higher up on the government’s agenda than legal online poker and the public is already outraged.
With the message already sent, and certainly read by Geithner, and assuming that Kyl will eventually back down before this spins out of control, the question that remains is: how will this incident affect the Treasury Secretary’s decisions regarding a potential second delay of the UIGEA’s implementation as the June 1st deadline is fast closing in on the beleaguered online poker and gambling industries?
