Senator Kyl Pushes Enforcement of Ban on Online Gambling
Jon Kyl may be the only man in America willing to publicly support the bill that has attempted to shut down online gambling in the United States. While groups across the political spectrum and unlikely alliances of every form call for the repeal of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, Senator Kyl, of Arizona, is demanding to know why enforcement is so slow in coming.
In a statement to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Kyl blamed the government and specifically the Federal Reserve for not enacting a program more quickly. Apparently ignoring the mountain of testimony given to the Financial Services Committee by government officials and banking representatives, Kyl acts as if foot-dragging is the problem with banning online casinos and gambling.
Referring to the bill introduced by Ron Paul and Barney Frank, Kyl mentions the rise of House legislation against the UIGEA, and attributes the new bill to slow progress on the part of the executive branch in establishing regulations.
However, the overwhelming belief of experts who have testified is that the UIGEA suffers from a lack of definition or clarity, and that online wagering cannot wholly be repressed, nor should it be. Certainly, any of the compulsive gamblers Kyl says he's protecting could have found his way to one of the myriad of legal, land-based casinos by now, and gambled his addictive heart out.
Kyl will almost certainly find that the wave of public sentiment is rolling heavily in favor of the Paul-Barney bill, and that, while he may join with other myopic legislators in delaying the inevitable, he will still have trouble convincing law enforcement to spend the man-hours and revenues necessary to try to prosecute ill-defined crimes that are soon to be legal.
