Home / Poker News May 2012 / Online Poker Petition Earns White House Reply
Online Poker Petition Earns White House Reply
Posted by: Randy Williams - Sat, 2012-05-19 15:48
The online petition initiative launched at the site of the White House quite a while ago in support of online poker and gambling, which earned the signature of thousands of online poker players, didn’t go unnoticed. Just when the whole thing began to slowly but surely fade away, deputy director of the National Economic Council and the President’s assistant on economic policy, Brian Reese has issued a rather lengthy albeit (according to many) quite unsatisfactory, response to the petition. The four-paragraph response consists of an introductory and a conclusion paragraph, both of which are fairly irrelevant for the issues brought up in the petition. The first middle-paragraph carries some significance though in that it underpins the DoJ’s position expressed last December regarding the federal legal status of online poker and gambling.
According to Brian Reese, placing online wagers on sporting events does indeed constitute illegal online gambling, while the legal status of
online poker and gambling isn’t currently defined in any shape or form on a federal level. Individual states have full authority to decide on this matter for their own jurisdictions. Those who can read between the lines obviously see this as confirmation of the fact that no federal regulation regarding the two above said online industries is currently in the works, nor does the President’s economic policy assistant see any immediate chance for such legislation to be passed.
What’s quite disappointing about the response is its failure to address the arguments in favor of job creation and federal tax-income revenue augmentation included in the We The People petition. Those who posted the said petition obviously viewed those arguments as their most potent ones, and now they seem to have fallen on deaf ears.
The petition finished with almost 10k signatures, far more than the 5k required for it to gain consideration and review. The fact that most other We The People petitions had been answered before the online poker one gave hope to its creators that officials were indeed carefully considering the issue and would not answer it haphazardly.
