The republican heads in both the US Senate and US House of Representatives have both come out against the pro online gambling bills. Spencer Bachus is one of the main people showing resistant to this and the bills will have little chance of passing as a result. The only hope is that the democrats can attach a pro poker bill to a unrelated must pass bill. If they were able to do this they would be legalizing online poker the same way congress tried to ban it in 2006. Rumors have been swirling that Harry Reid has been pushing behind the scenes for a pro online gambling bill to come up for vote in the senate.
For Harry Reid to finally come around and endorse online gambling means only one thing, brick and mortar casinos in Las Vegas now want online gambling legalized. Frank Fahrenkoph who is the head of the AGA which is backed by the major land based casinos tried to downplay the speculation that a bill might pass during this lame duck session. He told eGaming Review at G2E in Las Vegas last month that: “I have been asked 5,000 times in the last three weeks about whether [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid or some other Senator might put together a poker carve out bill, and my answer is, ‘I don’t know.’ Is it possible? Yes. It’s possible. How would it be done? It would probably be done in the way UIGEA was done. It was attached to a piece of legislation that everyone knows is going to pass. So if they reach a settlement on the Bush tax cuts, they would attach it.”
