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Several U.S. senators expressed their desire to implement new federal sports-betting standards during a high-profile Senate committee hearing on Tuesday (December 17).
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing entitled “America’s High-Stakes Bet on Legalized Sports Gambling” that featured testimony from National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) president Charlie Baker, former chief New Jersey regulator David Rebuck, and National Council on Problem Gambling executive director Keith Whyte, among others.
The focus during Tuesday’s hearing was on comments from federal lawmakers who have only occasionally shown any inclination to take any action on sports betting in the six-plus years since the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, opening the door for the expansion of sports betting across the United States.
“It is critical that Congress look into sports betting’s impact on America and determine how the industry should be regulated going forward,” said Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, a Democrat and chairman of the committee.
“It is virtually impossible to watch a sporting event today without being barraged by ads encouraging you to bet or hearing from a celebrity endorser about the latest parlay you should try and from the industry perspective, it's a very profitable development,” Durbin said. “But at what cost to the bettor? At what cost to the sport? At what cost to the school or the athlete?”
The senior U.S. senator from Illinois said he believed that “gambling operators must play a greater role in preventing addiction on the front end, by helping identify problem gamblers and directing them to help”.
He also specified that Tuesday’s hearing was “not the end of the discussion, but the beginning”, and repeated similar remarks to Vixio GamblingCompliance following the hearing's conclusion.
“I think we pointed out here the depth of the problem. It reaches so many different areas; the future of sports in this country, the question of addiction. These are major topics, we couldn't exhaust them today but we certainly opened the door and opened the conversation,” Durbin told Vixio.
Much of the focus in Tuesday’s hearing was on the online harassment of college athletes attributed to sports betting, and potential steps that could be taken to reduce that harassment.
Baker, in his testimony, called for a federal ban on all proposition bets involving collegiate athletes, and Democratic Senator Adam Schiff of California said he agreed that such bets should be prohibited.
“It sounds like it does nothing but create enormous problems for athletes,” Schiff said.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, also a Democrat, has been arguably the most active U.S. senator on policy matters related to sports betting.
Blumenthal is the co-sponsor of the SAFE Bet Act, which would introduce federal minimum standards, including mandatory affordability checks by operators and a ban on television advertising during most hours of the day and during live sporting events, among other provisions.
He also co-sponsors the GRIT Act, which would dedicate 50 percent of annual federal wagering excise tax revenues to problem gambling programs.
“We are in the midst of a sports-betting boom that is one of the most severe public health problems today,” Blumenthal said during Tuesday's hearing. “The nomenclature and the techniques and the sophistication of the trading practices here make Wall Street look like child's play.
“The risk-free bet, the throttling, the targeting of losers, customizing bets to those who are losing, and throttling back the winners, I mean, the plethora of techniques is staggering here, all to the benefit of the corporations that are profiting,” he continued.
Blumenthal pushed those who have expressed similar concerns to support the SAFE Bet Act.
“Right now we have a patchwork of half-hearted regulation,” he said. “States would still have responsibility, but they'd have to meet those minimum standards that would eliminate the kinds of promotions, ads, pitches and deceptive techniques that right now are so rampant.”
Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina also spoke of a desire to see the federal government step in and set minimum standards.
“I'm glad that we're having the hearing today to talk about getting this right because I think too many states are getting it wrong,” Tillis said.
The Republican senator stressed that he would never support legislation to legalize gambling at a federal level.
“But I would be very open to an independent commission that would be tasked by this body to spend a year putting together guardrails and a framework that makes sense so that states who choose to have [sports betting], that they have to conform to certain rules of the road.”
Looming over the hearing is the imminent end of the 118th Congress, with the Senate set to change from Democrat to Republican control on January 3.
That change will introduce a new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with Durbin handing over the gavel to Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and new priorities rising to the forefront.
Some of those priorities were evident during Tuesday’s hearing, when sports-betting discussion was repeatedly sidetracked by several Republican senators, including John Kennedy of Louisiana and Josh Hawley of Missouri confronting Baker on the NCAA’s handling of issues involving transgender athletes.
Durbin told Vixio following the hearing that he wanted to work with Blumenthal on moving forward with legislation, rather than seeking to introduce his own bill for sports betting. He also declined to predict that legislation would make it out of the committee in the next Congress, particularly given that the issue would have joint jurisdiction with other Senate committees.
Based on conversations with Tillis, however, he expressed his belief that Republicans will also have an interest in the issue.
“I think there's a feeling on both sides of the table that we need to address this and that portends well for the next Congress,” Durbin said.
Additional reporting by James Kilsby.
