Reid-Kyl Proposal Still Has Options

Reid-Kyl Proposal Still Has Options According to Brian Darling, senior fellow for government studies at the Heritage Foundation, Sen. Harry Reid's online poker federal legalisation proposal still has options for going through. Three possible options for 'the wily senator from Nevada', as Darling called Reid, while time is running out in the lame duck session prior to the adjournment of the current US Congressional session, could be the following: 1) attaching the gambling bill to another “must-pass” legislation - such as a possible fiscal cliff deal - as an amendment, 2) wait and attach the bill in a conference between the Senate and the House as legislators try to thrash out differences on a must-pass bill, 3) inserting the bill directly into the base language of another bill. Darling suggested a “secret negotiation” could be undertaken to get the bill through, saying that: “If he (Reid) has the will to do it, he has tools at his disposal,” Prior to that several US states expressed fears that the Reid-Kyl bill is more about giving his home state of Nevada commercial advantage than it is about "standardising online gambling", labeling the bill as a payoff to Nevada's casino industry. State lotteries directors and governors alike have argued that states should not be limited to offering only online poker to their residents if decide to go online in terms of states' rights. It was also commented that the American Gaming Association's recent support of the Reid-Kyl federal solution would benefit AGA members, ie. established and major land gambling interests. The publication Big Government sees Reid's efforts to push the bill as a red flag: "If Harry Reid's ideas become law, and one set of [federal] regulations governs, with only online poker being allowed, large corporations will be able to quickly snap up the lion's share of the gaming [business], with most of those corporations being casinos headquartered in Reid's home state of Nevada."