What the Real Focus Needs to Be This Year to Legalize/Help Poker

[BluffTHIS!]

What I am going to say here is mostly a repeat of what I and others have said in past threads, but I feel it needs to be constantly stressed.

Even *if* Frank's or Wexler's bill, or a combo of both, were to pass the house, that legislation is DOA in the senate where Kyl and others will place an immediate hold on it. So the real focus of lobbying by the PPA and other allies needs to be on the leadership of both houses, and on the committee chairs of major committees. Because the ONLY way we are going to get something passed is via the same route the IUGEA passed, i.e. by being attached to must pass legislation in conference committee.

So the current processes ongoing in the house need to be looked at as merely fine-tuning the language to a form that is acceptable to the most legislators in both houses, for subsequent attachment to some other bill, rather than as processes that will produce a stand-alone bill that has a snowball's chance of making it to enactment on its own.

And even that attachment is a longshot, which means all that can be done needs to be done to neuter the pending regs.

So here are the multiple points of what needs to be the real focus in the congress:

1) getting online poker legalized by attachment in conference committee to must pass legislation, which means cultivating the leaders and committee chairs in both houses;

2) watering down the regs as much as possible so as to have no chance to be effective, or *better yet* to reject the regs in their entireity which congress can do, or the equivalent action of refusing to fund enforcement of them.


This is the only political strategy that has *any chance* of bearing fruit this year, by either getting pro-poker legislation passed, or at least not making the status quo worse (despite the wishes of party poker to the contrary which seeks to harm the sites still in the US market).

The PPA and others should waste no further resources in seeking to get more co-sponsors for the bills in question, but rather on fine-tuning the language and lobbying the democratic leadership of both the house and senate to be willing to attach such language to something else. When all is said and done, it won't matter if there are 300 co-sponsors and a bill passes the house when Sen. Kyl just has to put a secret hold on it to kill it in the senate.