Congress can beat the spread

Want to bet online on whether LeBron James can win a championship in Cleveland? Or if the Wizards can bring Washington its first championship since the 1991 Redskins (yes, the Redskins)? The commissioner of the National Basketball Association, Adam Silver, wants to give you a chance to do it – legally.

Silver has provided a concise rationale for legalizing, regulating and taxing the entire internet gambling industry – a shadowy, generally illegal business that generates hundreds of billions of dollars a year in transactions.

{mosads}Silver wrote in the New York Times November 14, 2014 “I believe sports betting should be brought out of the underground and into the sunlight where it can be appropriately monitored and regulated.” 

“Gambling has become a popular and accepted form of entertainment in the United States. Most states offer lotteries. Over half of them have legal casinos. Three have approved some form of Internet gambling, with others poised to follow,” he argues.

If you can legally bet on the Super Bowl after flying to Las Vegas or bet on the Kentucky Derby at any track in the country, to cite two of the loopholes under existing law, why shouldn’t you be able to bet on sports at home, and do it legally on a smartphone or iPad?

Sheldon Adelson, the tenth richest man in the world and the boss at the Sands in Las Vegas, is the most prominent foe of legalizing sports betting. He says Internet gambling will lure children and propel gamblers into financial ruin, ignoring the safeguards against abuse available through technology.

Adelson is best known as a major contributor/shareholder in many Republican campaigns – more than $90 million in 2012 and lots more on the 2014 midterms. But even with his heavy investment in the G.O.P., Adelson tried and failed to get a nationwide ban on internet gambling stuffed into the omnibus spending bill in December.

The problem is political:  the issue lands on a fault line within Republican politics that splits social issues Republicans, libertarians and conservative groups into different camps.

Congress has tried something like this before. In 2010 the House Financial Services Committee tried to lift the ban that bars U.S. banks from processing offshore internet gambling transactions.

Advocates of lifting the ban at the time sought a system of federal regulation, from which states could opt out, providing oversight and generating a 6 percent transaction tax with two-thirds going back to the states.

Back then they excluded sports betting, unwilling to tangle with the National Football League, which insisted betting would undermine the “integrity of the game”.

But, as Commissioner Silver said, “times have changed.” Not the least of those changes is the moral authority of the NFL. Moreover, all major sports leagues now have affiliations with online fantasy league gambling, exempted from the sports betting ban on the argument that skill, not luck, is involved. Knowledge of which players are worth investing in requires some study, of course, but so does deciding whether the Redskins can beat the point spread on any given Sunday.

What has also changed is Congress. Based on my years of working with Members on and around this issue, I sense a new attitude and acceptance that the time is right to do something on internet gambling. Legalizing, regulating and taxing internet gambling is that opportunity — “subject,” as Silver wrote, “to strict regulatory requirements and technological safeguards.”

Downey served in the House from 1975 to 1993. He is currently the founder and chairman of the Downey McGrath Group.