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by eadmund
263 days ago
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> In 1992, New Jersey Senator and former basketball player Bill Bradley sponsored a Federal law called PASPA, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. This law banned most states from legalizing sports books: businesses that set odds, accepted wagers, and paid out winnings on sports games. Federal laws (i.e., laws of the United States rather than the individual states) derive their authority from the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution reads: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’ No part of the Constitution delegates power to the United States to regulate intrastate sport or gambling; no later amendment repeals the Tenth with respect to sports gambling. So Congress had no constitutional authority to pass the law in the first place. I detest sports gambling with a passion, but that doesn’t matter: PASPA was never constitutional. The federal government has legitimate power to regulate interstate gambling and the states each have the ability to regulate intrastate gambling. I don’t think that it should be illegal, but I do think that it should be regulated like other addictive and dangerous things. |
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The problem was that PASPA was sloppy and didn’t do that; its mechanism was to tell states what laws they could or couldn’t pass, which is unconstitutional for reasons outside the Commerce Clause.
Per Proskauer:
> Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the opinion was Justice Alito's unequivocal statement that "Congress can regulate sports gambling directly," if it elects to do so. While Justice Thomas, citing an 1867 Supreme Court case, expressed doubt that Congress could prohibit sports betting that does not cross state lines, there appear to be at least eight Justices who believe that Congress has this authority under the Commerce Clause. Thus, Congress could adopt a uniform federal policy that would permit and regulate sports gambling throughout the nation and thereby preempt the various state laws. Alternatively, it could choose to outlaw sports gambling throughout the country, although that approach seems unlikely at this point.
https://www.proskauer.com/alert/us-supreme-court-strikes-dow...
Now, of course, the proverbial cat is out of the bag.
(IANAL, this is not legal advice.)