Supreme Court to weigh in on sports betting
WASHINGTON – New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie gambled big-time five years ago when he signed a law allowing sports betting at casinos and racetracks and dared anyone to “try to stop us.”
That’s exactly what college and professional sports leagues and the federal government have done, thanks to a succession of court rulings upholding a 25-year-old federal law that prohibits gambling on sports outside Nevada and three other states with small sports lotteries.
But Christie has one last shot before leaving office next month. The Supreme Court on Monday will hear oral
arguments in his case and could decide, as many court watchers predict, that the ban violates states’ rights. Such a ruling could open the floodgates to sports betting in any state willing to regulate it.
It’s not often that the high court tackles a case with so much weighty drama — not just sports and gambling, but a classic constitutional battle between the federal government and the states over the 225-year-old system of government known as federalism.
“To use a gambling term, it’s a trifecta,” Paul Clement, the attorney representing the NCAA and pro sports leagues, said recently.
Clement will face off Monday against Theodore Olson, his former boss in the U.S. solicitor general’s office. Olson headed the office for the first three years of President George W. Bush’s tenure and was followed by Clement for the next four years.
The two gladiators will tangle over the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA), passed by Congress in 1992 to preserve what lawmakers felt was the integrity of the games. Sponsored by former senator Bill Bradley, a New Jersey Democrat who once played small forward for the New York Knicks, the law preceded the advent and growth of Internet gambling.
Because Nevada had legalized sports betting in 1949, it was grandfathered in, and the state now handles nearly $5 billion annually. Delaware, Montana and Oregon were allowed to keep sports lotteries. Other states were given a year’s leeway to get in on the action, but even New Jersey failed to take advantage.
Now even Delaware, which has a leg up on 46 states by virtue of its complicated “parlay” betting involving three or more National Football League games, is watching its neighbor’s Supreme Court case with great interest. The state’s handle has risen each year since
2009 but topped out last year at
$46 million — just 1% of Nevada’s take. The Congress that passed PASPA with only five dissents thought it was keeping college and professional sports free from gambling and its connection to organized crime. That hasn’t proven true. Today, illegal sports betting in the United States is a $150-billion-a-year business, nearly 10% of which is bet on the Super Bowl and the NCAA’s “March Madness” tournament.
“Far from stopping sports betting, PASPA has just moved it into the shadows, all while Americans’ views on the matter have evolved,” the American Gaming Association argues in legal papers. The group cites polling that shows
85% of Americans now view casino gambling as acceptable.
The sports leagues remain opposed, at least in principle, to easing or erasing the federal law’s rules. The brief submitted by the NCAA and the four major pro sports leagues quoted from a 1992 Senate report that considered the new revenue but concluded that “the risk to the reputation of one of our nation’s most popular pastimes ... is not worth it.”
However, in the decades since the legislation was passed, the National Hockey League has located a team in Las Vegas, and the NFL’s Oakland Raiders are due to follow.