Fortunately, according to our sources inside the Massachusetts legislature, this bill isn’t likely to pass because both the House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi  and Governor Patrick are against it. While the governor supported casinos in the state, he thinks slots are a pretty bad idea.

…. Governor Patrick told reporters he thought racetrack slots would not provide adequate benefits to offset negative social impacts. “I have also said that if there is a compromise out there for resort-style casinos and slots at the tracks, then I’m open to that, but we can’t have that debate if this goes down the way it is. So as far as I’m concerned that’s off the table,” Patrick said last week.
Last December, in pitching his casino plan, Patrick had indicated he would veto racetracks slots as part of a casino package. Expanded gambling proponents in the House have repeatedly failed to muster a majority in favor of any proposal and the threat of a gubernatorial veto, which requires a two thirds vote in each branch to override, would loom large in any future consideration of gambling bills.
- CASINO VOTE FALLOUT CONTINUES from March 24, 2008.

The House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi  is against increased gambling of any kind, not to mention, this slots bill has been defeated in previous years by a wide margin.

Today, the big money special interests lost and the people of Massachusetts won. Members of the House withstood incredible pressure from the deep‐pocketed gambling industry, unions and the Governor’s office.

This is the third consecutive session in which the House has overwhelmingly voted to reject the harmful expansion of gaming in the Commonwealth. The cost of creating a casino culture is too high. There are far better ways to create jobs and increase revenue The House has repeatedly pursued initiatives that spur our economy through life sciences, clean energy and other industries that far better utilize our strengths. Massachusetts has always been known for its brain power, innovation and technical expertise.

Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York all have casinos and they all have higher taxes than Massachusetts. Pennsylvania allowed slots to give property tax relief and, now, their governor is proposing a major sales tax increase.

This issue has dominated the debate here at the State House for more than six months. The Legislature had three public hearings, including a 13‐hour session this week, and proponents and opponents debated for more than six hours on the floor today before voting.

The debate on casino gambling is over. We will move on and the House will continue to work collaboratively with the Governor and the Senate to grow our economy in meaningful ways.

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.

“It is ironic for a bill to legalize gambling in Massachusetts to outlaw and severely punish gambling online. It simply makes no sense,” said Joe Brennan, Jr., Chairman of iMEGA. “How can an activity that is legal in 48 of the 50 states be a criminal act simply because it utilizes the Internet? If an American has the right to choose in the “real world,” shouldn’t they enjoy that very same right when they are online?”

The protection of digital civil rights and the ability of all Americans to exercise their freedoms with an expectation of privacy, in a safe and protected manner, is as important as it has been to protect the right of every American to engage in the freedom of speech. It is imperative that haphazard government regulation of Internet not create a slippery slope, whereby lawmaking encroaches on all aspects of Internet use, severely hampering innovation, commerce and information, as well as individual rights of personal privacy.

“Like many of the government’s forays into cyberspace, these efforts are well intended but yield the considerable practical problems of unintended consequences,” Brennan said. “In this case, Americans’ right to privacy and freedom of expression are imperiled by overzealous lawmaking.”

Today, readily-available commercial technology already exists to effectively address the social problems that opponents of Internet gambling seek to remedy, without abridging Americans’ rights. Electronic content filtering and financial vectoring are just some of the tools utilized by industry and individuals every day to ameliorate the social ills ostensibly serving to motivate the proponents of this provision. It is ironic, then, that the very groups that this provision is intended to protect — such as children and individuals with addictive disorders — would be made more vulnerable by its implementation.

Currently, iMEGA is engaged with the Department of Justice in litigation in Federal court over the constitutionality of the Unlawful Internet Gaming and Enforcement Act (UIGEA), a bill that banned most Internet gaming nationally. iMEGA believes the challenge to UIGEA will fundamentally shape the future of the Internet and determine whether Americans’ right to privacy will be protected online or dismissed.

Consequently, as this case makes its way through the legal system, we believe that it would be best for the Massachusetts Legislature to remove this provision from the legislation and at the very least wait until the courts have acted on the legality of online gambling.