Following up on yesterday’s post about Massachusets anti-online gambling bill, after todays vote in Boston, bad news for the governor’s casino bill which contained the anti-online gaming provision. It lost 10-8 on a procedural vote in committee today, so the already-slim chance of it passing is now close to zero. The full State House is going to vote on it tomorrow, and the expectation is for it to be beat pretty handily. The Massachusetts’ Senate is also much more favorable to gambling in general, but the House does controls the agenda.
Senate President Pro Tempore Stanley Rosenberg, designated by Senate President Therese Murray as her top adviser on gambling, recently spent three days in Quebec on a fact-finding trip, meeting with representatives from the government-sanctioned gambling industry there, visiting two casinos, and talking with social services officials. Asked if the trip had prompted him to lean for or against Patrick’s plan, Rosenberg smiled, “I am in an information-gathering stage of my work.”
In Quebec, Rosenberg said, he plumbed the government’s efforts toward “security, integrity, transparency, the vendors, the hiring of employees,” and controlling addiction and mental health. He spoke with social services officials who oppose gambling, and business people. He called the trip “fascinating.”
Rosenberg said he had visited casinos in Montreal and Gatineau, and the central gambling regulation offices.
A Harvard Law School professor who studies Internet gambling said that, in talks with administration and industry officials, he’s been unable to determine the anti-online gambling clause had found its way into the bill.
“I’ve been talking to just about everybody I can talk to, and it is really interesting to get to the bottom of how this provision actually got into the bill,” said Charles Nesson, William Weld professor of law at Harvard Law. “You start out thinking that it’s the casino interests, because they’re really the guys that wrote the bill, and then it turns out that the principal guys that were at the hearing didn’t even know it was there.”
Patrick’s press secretary, Kyle Sullivan, called Nesson’s charge that lobbyists wrote the bill “outrageous and ill-informed.”
The criminalization effort also directly contradicts US Rep. Barney Frank’s effort to sanction online gambling. Frank, a Patrick political ally, has criticized the clause.
Parts of this entry are sourced from: PATRICK ONLINE GAMBLING BAN ILL-FATED, SENATOR TOURS CANADA’S INDUSTRY by Jim O’Sullivan.
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[...] was defeated on a 108-46 vote. For our previous coverage of the story you can see our posts from yesterday and three days ago. Today, the big money special interests lost and the people of Massachusetts [...]