Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming October 2014 38 Sense and Nonsense from Congress “Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens —and then everybody disagrees.” Boris Marshalov I t’s generally known that the US Congress is about as popular today as cockroaches. That is actually unfair to cockroaches. In a head to head survey conducted by Public Policy Polling, cockroaches had a more favorable rating than Congress. And that was in January 2013. By June, a different polling organization, Gallup, found congressional approval had gone down even further, to a historic low of 10%. This is not only the worst rating ever for the legislative branch of the federal government, it is the lowest approval rating for any institution of any kind since Gallup first started taking surveys of the public approval of Congress 40 year ago. And this was before the Republicans in Congress shut down the federal government and brought the US to the brink of defaulting on its national debt. It’s not just the misuse by the GOP of the filibuster in the Senate or the repeated attempts at economic extortion by the Tea Party crackpots in the House of Representatives. On the few days that Congress actually meets to work in D.C., the politicians seem to have no connection with the real world. The Republicans in the House orchestrate televised “investigations,” on burning non-issues, like Benghazi, or hold hearings on abortion and women’s health with no women testifying. The most recent example was a hearing on Internet gambling, with only opponents, and one guy who wants to sell something, testifying. Worse, the few members of Congress who actually showed up for this hearing on online gaming seemed to not know what they were talking about. The new Democratic US Senator from Hawaii, Brian Schatz, might be forgiven for his comments. He was only appointed to Congress at the end of December and is the second youngest member of the Senate. But somebody, like an aide or a senior Senator, should have told him that, no, the federal government is not going to overrule Hawaii’s complete prohibition on commercial gambling. It is impossible to imagine Congress imposing the same policies toward gaming on both Nevada and Utah, or Hawaii. But the Republican US Senator from Nevada, Dean Heller, has no excuse. He is the ranking member of the committee hearing the testimony. And coming from Nevada, he had to know that the main point he kept reiterating was simply wrong. Many of the members of Congress, but especially Sen. Heller, repeatedly blamed President Obama’s Department of Justice for “unilaterally” overturning decades of established law. The law in question is the federal Wire Gambling and the Law Professor I. Nelson Rose is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on gambling law and is a consultant and expert witness for governments, the industry and players. His latest books, “Internet Gaming Law” (1st and 2nd editions),”Blackjack and the Law”, “Gaming Law: Cases and Materials” and “Gaming Law in a Nutshell” are available through his Web site, www.GamblingAndTheLaw.com . By I. Nelson Rose