Notable Legislation Regarding Sports Gambling
The history of gambling in sports is rife with examples of various government bodies attempting to regulate or cease the activity. Officially, the government stance has been that gambling on sports strikes at the heart of the integrity of sport, as the millions spent in gambling inevitably ends up causing a great temptation for both professional and amateur athletes to take the fate of the money line into their own hands.
While various government bodies are content to use words to note the evils of spots gambling, however, their actions do not always back up their message. Considering the prevalence of government-sanctioned sports gambling activities such as sports tickets, the real issue seems to be one of taxable dollars, not the integrity of sport. In many instances on the timeline regarding legislation against sports gambling, the government is clearly trying to eliminate the chance that bookmakers are not declaring profits by streamlining the gambling process. Here is a timeline that highlights some of the major steps by legislative bodies to regulate and sometimes to eliminate sports betting.
1992: 1992 saw the passage of The Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. This Act was proposed after Congress noted that sports gambling was a national problem. The Act effectively banned sports gambling by any government entity or any individual in the United States, with the exception of the states of Nevada, Montana, Delaware, and Oregon (exempted through a grandfather clause). When read in conjunction with the Wire Act, however, sports betting is limited to the state of Nevada only. The United States Justice department opposed this most comprehensive of laws in the history of gambling in sports as a violation of the state’s right to raise money on their own terms.
2001,2002: During both 2001 and 2002, a total of four bills were proposed in the House of Representatives and in the United States Senate seeking to close the loophole that allowed Nevada to continue sports gambling operations. While the bills had a lot of support among members of both bodies, they did not reach the floor for voting. Part of the reason behind this was the massive campaign launched by the gambling lobby, which stood to lose millions in Las Vegas alone if the Act was made law.
2006: The United States Congress attached a rider to the Safe Port Act that effectively prohibited offshore gambling sites from receiving money from American gamblers. The rider was passed hours before Congress disbanded for the fall elections. Many gambling sites will no longer take bets from Americans, sports books included, until their lawyers can interpret the law as it applies to individual sites.
There have been measures proposed to ban sports gambling every year since 199, with the exception of 2005. With Internet gambling on the rise, the United States government won a major coup with the rider on the Safe Ports Act. It is perhaps the biggest blow ever dealt to bookmakers, and certainly to those who operate online, in the history of gambling in sports.
