Inside Asian Gaming

February 2015 inside asian gaming 17 In Focus customer? No! Can you prevent money laundering? No! Can you prevent underage children? … I’m concerned about college students. They are of age, and I’m concerned about poor people who really can’t afford to do it, that we’re putting all these temptations smack on their kitchen table.” He reiterated his views last fall in an address he delivered at the Global Gaming Expo in Las Vegas: “I see no benefit, and coming from a family—the working class family, a less-than-working class ... people that are going to be exploited, that are going to be abused the most. I don’t want those people to get abused. Because when I look at people like that, I see the faces of my parents.” But despite the billionaire’s standing as one the GOP’s largest individual donors and a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, RAWA went nowhere in the 113th Congress. As a measure of Internet gambling’s traction as a national priority, the House Judiciary Committee, half of whose 22 members had signed on as co-sponsors of the bill, couldn’t bring it to a hearing. It was even less visible in the Senate, where the Democrats still held a slim majority. The arm-twisting on its behalf was reported to be furious after the November election, but the few weeks that remained in the lame-duck session weren’t enough to scare up the support needed to bring it to a vote. A last-ditch effort was mounted in December to include its language in a must-pass $1.1 trillion measure to fund most government operations through the end of the current fiscal year. But when that failed there was nothing for Mr Adelson’s top lobbyist Andy Abboud to do but vow to renew the fight, and he was not wanting for metaphors in expressing his confidence that his boss ultimately would prevail. “The die is cast on this,” he said. “The cake is baked.” SELF-INFLICTED WOUNDS The chances that Mr Adelson and his supporters will get Internet gambling banned look a lot better heading into 2015. This is not to say they’re a lock by any means. On its surface, the composition of the 114th Congress that took office the first week of January is precisely to the billionaire’s liking and one over which his influence in several key policy respects promises to be greater than at any time in the past. The Republican Party has taken back control of the Senate for the first time in a decade, and for the next two years will enjoy its largest overall majority on Capitol Hill—247 seats in the House, 54 in the Senate—since the Congress that presided over the onset of the Great Depression in 1929-31. Mr Adelson spent upwards of $100 million in the 2012 electoral cycle to prevent President Obama’s re-election and achieve the Republican Congress he finally has in hand. Several tens of millions of that were poured into a quixotic comeback bid by Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the House and an avatar of the New Right a generation ago whom Mr Adelson, a fervent Zionist, supported for the GOP presidential nomination for his militant support of Israel. In June of that year, Mr Adelson gave $10 million to the main political action committee backing front-runner Mitt Romney’s campaign for the nomination. A month later, Mr Romney was seated at Mr Adelson’s right, pledging support for Israel at a fund-raiser at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that raised more than $1 million for his eventual victory. Much to the chagrin of both men, he would be defeated by Mr Obama in November. In the clearest indication yet that Mr Adelson’s hard-bought influence is finally paying off, last month, House Speaker John Boehner stirred a hornet’s nest in the volatile Middle East by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington in March to address a joint session of Congress on sanctions against Iran, a move Mr Obama has threatened to veto if it arrives on his desk as legislation. It’s a game less calculated to neutralize whatever effectiveness the president can hope to exercise over foreign policy in his last two years in office as it is to shore up support from the likes of Mr Adelson for the likes of Mr Boehner, a 25-year veteran of the House and a protégé of Mr Gingrich’s who for reasons that remain unfathomable to many Beltway insiders continually finds his conservative credentials under suspicion. Twenty-five of his own House members voted against his re-election as speaker last month, twice as many as tried to unseat him in 2013. As for Mr Adelson, it’s well-known that he considers Iran’s nuclear program a direct threat to Israel, and punishing the country for continuing to pursue it is an issue dear to his heart. He has in the past provided sizable cash support through a family foundation to a group called United Against Nuclear Iran, according to tax documents cited by venerable liberal weekly The Nation . UANI advocates food and medicine blockades among other sanctions. And in one of his less guarded public moments, and he’s been known to have a few— this one occurred in October 2013 in a speech at New York’s Yeshiva “I see no benefit, and coming from a family—the working class family, a less- than-working class ... people that are going to be exploited, that are going to be abused the most. I don’t want those people to get abused. Because when I look at people like that, I see the faces of my parents.” The Wire Act dates back to the early 1960s and Bobby Kennedy’s war on organized crime. Under George W. Bush it would be broadly interpreted to sanction a war on Web gambling. Then things changed in a big way in December 2011 when the Obama Justice Department responded to an inquiry by several state lotteries with a memorandum stating its opinion that the act applies only to sports betting.