House Passes Bill to End Fiscal Standoff
As the 112th Congress wound down, last night the House of Representatives passed a bill to stave off massive spending cuts and tax increases in its usual last-minute style, voting instead to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans while keeping taxes low for the majority of tax-paying citizens. The so-called Fiscal Cliff crisis has dominated news coverage for months, with partisan bickering threatening to push the country back into recession.
If the mainstream news media is to be believed, Americans were riveted to each impending development over the Christmas and New Years holidays, but in all of the hubbub the topic of online poker received no attention whatsoever. Despite the ongoing support of powerful Senate Democrat Harry Reid, whose home state of Nevada would stand to benefit greatly from the federal regulation of online poker, legislation aimed at doing just that failed to garner enough GOP support to pass and was declared dead by Reid in the weeks leading up to the holidays.
Yet, with Reid heavily involved in the behind-the-scenes fiscal negotiations, proponents of the game weren’t quite ready to let the issue go. And rightly so, as the chance that online poker could have been tacked onto a bill at the last minute remained a dim, though still very real possibility, up until the eleventh hour deal was struck on New Year’s Day.
The issue of online gambling has long proven to be a derisive topic, with many opponents citing states’ rights issues at the forefront of their resistance. It is possible that this lame duck Congressional session was simply too closely observed for such legislative maneuvering to be attempted. That is to say, with the eyes of the nation seemingly watching every play in the Fiscal Cliff chess game, sneaking by a controversial bit of legislation just couldn’t be done.
The Fiscal Cliff negotiations were of course famously tense, with both Democrats and Republicans refusing to budge much from their respective positions. Politico reported that at the height of negotiations last Friday, Speaker of the House John Boehner told Harry Reid to “go f— (him)self” when the two men passed outside the Oval Office.
Reid, who denounced Boehner for having more interest in retaining power than reaching concensus, had accused the Speaker of treating the House like “a dictatorship” and replied to his profanity by asking, “What are you talking about?”
It is anticipated that President Obama will swiftly sign the bill into law, leaving poker aficionados to turn their attention to regulation at the state level. By the end of 2013, it is expected that Nevada and Delaware will begin offering online poker to residents, while a broader bill regulating multiple forms of online betting has passed in New Jersey, though it has yet to be signed into law by that state’s Republican governor, Chris Christie.
