House Judiciary Subcommittee Examines States' Rights Implications of Online Gambling
House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., expressed his personal opposition to online gambling but noted the complicated states’ rights issues behind any attempt to reverse the Justice Department’s 2011 ruling on the Wire Act. Goodlatte’s written testimony was for Wednesday’s…
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House Judiciary Crime Subcommittee hearing on Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s, R-Utah, reintroduced Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA) (HR-707). The bill would reverse DOJ’s 2011 decision that said the act didn’t prohibit online lotteries and Internet gambling that doesn’t involve sporting events. “Updating the Wire Act can be a tool to protect states’ rights to prohibit gambling activity,” Goodlatte said. “However, there is also another states’ rights dynamic that we must acknowledge, and that is what to do about states that want to regulate and permit Internet gambling within their own borders.” “RAWA would appear to overrule state authority to permit intrastate legal gaming,” said Andrew Moylan, R Street Institute executive director, in written testimony. But RAWA “could be rewritten in such a way as to protect wholly intrastate activity from federal scrutiny,” he said. “One can only crack a smile at the recent approach of America’s gambling interests who are now claiming internet gambling is ‘a states rights’ issue,” said Les Bernal, Stop Predatory Gambling national director, in written testimony. “For most of the last decade, many of these same gambling interests have been lobbying to get the federal government to sponsor and promote internet gambling.”