New Jersey 'Urging' Trump Administration Not To Support Online Poker BanGarden State Wants To Keep Online Games |
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The Garden State is prepared to fight back.
The New Jersey legislature, which legalized online casino gambling just a few short years ago, is now concerned that a Donald Trump administration could potentially try to shut down the popular games.
A joint resolution on the table from both the Assembly and the Senate in the Garden State is “urging” the president, his team and Congress “to oppose measures and actions which would prohibit states from authorizing and conducting internet gaming.”
New Jersey-sanctioned online casinos had about $200 million in revenue last year, up more than 30 percent year-over-year. That helped the Atlantic City casino industry as a whole record its first winning year in a decade. New Jersey is also in talks with the U.K. to share liquidity for online poker.
The Obama Department of Justice in 2011 re-interpreted the 1961 Wire Act to allow states to have online lotteries and online casinos. There have been legislative attempts—known as the “Restoration of America’s Wire Act” or “RAWA”—to put the genie back in the bottle.
There’s also a threat that Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General could restore the Wire Act without Congress. Sessions said he was “shocked” when the DoJ modernized the decades-old law.
The resolution added that a federal prohibition against internet gaming “would directly and negatively impact New Jersey by dismantling the investments that the state and the casinos have already made, taking away the economic and employment opportunities already realized by the state and its residents, and foreclosing the future potential of internet gaming to generate […] tax revenue, create high-tech software jobs, and foster valuable business ventures for Atlantic City casinos.”
The man funding efforts to ban online gaming is billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson, who thinks the games hurt brick-and-mortars casinos. Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corp. is the largest casino developer on the planet in terms of revenue.
The company just announced that revenue in Q4 of last year was more than $3 billion.
Adelson pledged to “spend whatever it takes” to ban online gaming.
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