Home / Poker News November 2012 / The Poker Grapevine – Reid/Kyl Bill may be Unconstitutional
The Poker Grapevine – Reid/Kyl Bill may be Unconstitutional
Posted by: James Carter. - Fri, 2012-11-23 06:31
With Congress’ lame-duck session looming on the horizon, the question on everyone’s mind is: will a poker bill be pushed through this time? Partisanship proved to be the un-doing of a similar push a couple of years ago, when Senate majority leader Harry Reid threw his support behind an
online poker initiative. This time around, there’s a bi-partisan bill in the making, which offers more hope for legalization. According to a legal expert however, the proposed form of the Reid/Kyl bill may run into a rather unprecedented hurdle: it may be unconstitutional. The above said expert was Paul Clements, a former US solicitor under George W. Bush, whose opinion on the matter was requested by the Poker Players Alliance.
Clements has found several things wrong with the bill, the most important of which was the issue concerning the 5-year banishment from the US market of offshore online poker sites which had illegally operated in the US after the 2006 UIGEA. Clements saw “due process” problems with that issue.
Clements’ concerns have apparently been brought into John Kyl and Harry Reid’s attention too.
According to Clements, the bill that Reid had tried to push through the 2010 lame duck session, suffered from similar constitutional issues. In some cases – Clements has pointed out – the Reid/Kyl bill’s constitutional issues are even more pronounced than those of the 2012 bill.
While none of the two main sponsors of the bill have thus far commented on Clements’ findings, a spokesperson said that the bill was still in the process of being written, obviously alluding to the flexibility that the authors have in regards to pretty much every aspect of it all.
In other news: the DoJ announced that a third-party claims administrator will be hired in January 2013, to handle Full Tilt’s US funds-remissions.
