Reid’s Online Poker Earmark Debacle Still Serves Masters

Folding the online poker bill still leaves Reid bosses winners.

Yesterday US Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled his proposed earmark regulating online poker from the compromise tax cut bill. While many are claiming the withdrawal as a major defeat for Internet poker supporters, the move is just the other side of a win-win proposition for the casino companies manipulating Reid’s strings.

The public attention drawn by the Reid bill’s inclusion in the tax package provided the legislative will to make the measure a special example of political resistance to earmarks and legislated pork projects. Senator John McCain, a longtime foe of hidden legislation, proclaimed, “For the first time since I’ve been here (Congress), we stood up and said ‘stop, enough.’ ”

But the failure of online gambling to achieve regulated status in the US is nearly as much a victory for Reid’s biggest campaign contributors, Caesar’s Entertainment and MGM, as passing the poker bill would have been. Gaming analysts point out that if the bill were adopted, the big Nevada gaming operators would have received heavy competitive advantages over established Internet gambling companies; but, in being so publicly forced to separate the gambling bill, Reid will now be free to say online gambling is not a passable issue, which still preserves the monopolies enjoyed by US gaming over foreign operators.

Barney Frank has followed a straightforward, honest approach to passing a comprehensive Internet gaming bill which would meet international trade agreement requirements, and the bill has ever so slowly advanced. Now, in a matter of days, Reid has effectively adopted the very tactics for which Republicans have been pilloried in passing the UIGEA, and the result is an unappetizing choice between a bad protectionist gaming bill and continued flawed and unconstitutional attempts to prohibit Internet wagering altogether.