Dean Heller Hopes to End Legal US Online Gambling
Nevada Senator Dean Heller announced on Friday he would introduce a bill in Congress which would make online casinos illegal in the United States. Senator Heller said he wants to restore a stricter interpretation of the 1961 Wire Act.
If Heller’s bill were signed into law, the federal statutes would revert back to the interpretation of the gaming law which prevailed from 2006 to 2011 in the United States.
After the passage of the UIGEA law in 2006, online poker sites, casinos, and sportsbooks were illegal in the United States. In 2011, the Justice Department announced a new interpretation of the Wire Act, stating they believed it only applied to sports gambling. Over the past two years, Delaware, New Jersey, and Nevada passed laws to make online gambling legal inside their states.
When the new laws were announced, the land-based gambling industry divided up into separate camps. Caesars Entertainment and MGM Entertainment invested millions of dollars in online gaming sites for New Jersey and Nevada. The Las Vegas Sands Corp. and Steve Wynn chose not to invest in the new gaming industries, the Sands because of moral qualms and Steve Wynn because he saw it as a risky proposition. If Dean Heller gets his way, Steve Wynn would appear to have been right.
Heller Hopes to Protect Land Gaming
Senator Heller says his interest in passing a new law is to save the land-based casinos in Las Vegas, Reno, and the rest of Nevada. He says that the Vegas Strip gaming interests would be mortally wounded if online gambling was made legal. This is an issue Heller has championed for several years. In 2012, Heller and Reid had disagreements over who should take the lead on this issue, though those disputes may have been election-year wrangling. In the summer of 2013, Dean Heller gave a speech which outlined his reasons for opposing licensed online gambling at the state and federal levels.
When asked why he opposed Internet gaming when MGM and Caesars are embracing it, Senator Heller said, “(They) are corporate entities and they believe they can play the game. They’re corporate entities. They’ve got to keep their shareholders happy…They’ve made the determination that they can compete in that market…I think the devastation for brick and mortar in this state…would just be a final nail, I think, in keeping these businesses healthy.”
Harry Reid to Sign on to Bill
Dean Heller’s bill appears to have bipartisan support. Heller, a Republican, says that Nevada Democrat Harry Reid will support his bill. The two are set to negotiate on the provisions of any anti-gambling bill to be introduced on the Senate floor. Reid’s motivation in supporting the bill would be to protect Nevada’s land-based gaming interests, supposedly.
Senator Heller says he expects fierce competition from the land based gambling companies which have invested in the Internet gaming model. He went on to acknowledge that the politics of passing such a bill could get complicated, because the industry itself is quite divided on the subject. Some see the online websites to be a valuable boost to their land-based businesses, while others see them as the death knell of the brick and mortar industry. Sheldon Adelson even claims that online gambling leads people into gambling addiction, while his brick-and-mortar casinos are relatively harmless when it comes to problem gambling.
Opposing Gambling Companies
With such a complex issue, the next few months could be a time of stress for Nevada lawmakers and the gaming interests they serve. Heller added, “Right now there’s a majority probably around here that want nothing done. You know, they want it Wild Wild West when it comes to Internet gambling. And I don’t think that’s good.”
Sides are aligning in what should be the defining political battle for online gambling in 2014. Senators Dean Heller and Harry Reid will be backed by the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling (CSIG), which is funded by Sheldon Adelson. On the other side is the Coalition for Consumer and Online Protections (C4COP), which was founded to counter the CSIG. The C4COP will have the support of the American Gaming Association, and presumably online gaming interests like Caesars Entertainment and MGM Entertainment. Given that the state-level politicians in the states of Nevada, New Jersey, and Delaware are seeking revenues from the online gaming companies they’ve licensed, one can expect those states to be concerned about maintaining a potential source of public funding.
The new legislation should be introduced to the U.S. Senate in the next month or so, according to a report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
