Recent Legislation

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are crawling forward with legislation that will not put the slightest dent into the enormous world of online poker playing. Current legislation that recently passed the House and passed a committee in the Senate merely makes it a bit more difficult to put money into offshore gambling sites.

Please remember that before any legislation becomes law, it must first pass the House and the Senate. Thereafter, the two different bills must be reconciled, one with another, approved, and then signed into law by the president.

The House: In the July issue of Online Poker News, I informed our readers about the passage of H.R. 2143, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Funding Prohibition Act, which passed in the House of Representatives by a vote of 319-104. Not to worry. The bill contains no criminal or civil liabilities and it is a shell of last year's version. It does not make online poker playing illegal; it merely makes it more difficult to get money into an offshore site.

The Senate: A few weeks ago, a committee in the Senate reviewed a bill banning the use of credit cards, checks, or money transfers to place or pay out online poker bets. After no debate and approximately six minutes, the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee voted unanimously to send the bill to the Senate for consideration. A last-minute change to the bill removed language that would allow states to legalize the practice within their boundaries. This has already caused turmoil on Capitol Hill. Anytime the Federal government enters into the arena reserved to the states, there will be great debate and pause. The bill was not passed by the Senate; it was merely passed by a committee consisting of 19 members.

The next step will be that this bill must pass the Senate floor before it goes to conference with House negotiators. Passing the Senate floor will be a difficult challenge because the last-minute change will cause considerable controversy. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., have already stated publicly that they cannot support the bill, based on the new language.

If the bill is approved by the Senate in one form or other, members of each chamber will then form a committee to iron out the differences between the two versions. They will then form one new bill which will again be voted on and then sent to the President for signature, if approved.

The bottom line is that after all the extended, acrimonious debates in the House and Senate, if ever a bill is agreed upon, all the bill will accomplish is to prevent the use of credit cards, checks, and electronic fund transfers for Internet gambling. Evidently, our senators just don't realize that the online gaming industry is way ahead of this legislation and alternative ways of getting money into offshore sites are already well in place. Our legislators are going to have to do a bit more homework if they think they can cripple more than 1800 offshore gambling sites pulling in billions of dollars yearly from U.S citizens.

Allyn Jaffrey received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California at Irvine in 1977, where she graduated cum laude and became a member of Phi Beta Kappa for scholastic achievement. She is a practicing criminal defense attorney, having received a Juris Doctorate with scholastic merit from Western State University where she served as Research Editor and Executive Editor of Law Review in 1982-1983. She has lectured all over California, teaching other attorneys the fine points of criminal defense. She specializes in legal research and her areas of expertise include the filing of extraordinary writs, appeals and motions where a lower court judge commits legal error or where the police or prosecutors engage in misconduct. Allyn has been closely following the development of gaming law and the Internet ever since Jay Cohen was convicted in New York of operating a sports betting business from Antigua in violation of the Wire Act.

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