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For those of you monitoring Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s attempts to get a bill passed that would legalize Internet poker in the United States, it was confirmed on Monday that, as expected, the draft legislation was not attached to the tax extension bill. Instead, all eyes are on a spending bill that could be voted on this lame duck session.
“He’s really pressing his foot on the gas for this,” Politico.com’s Mike Allen said during an appearance this morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe.
Reid’s election contributions from the Las Vegas casinos that favor legalized online gambling totaled $375,000 from just Caesars Entertainment Corporation (Harrahs) and MGM alone. One Congressional aide has dubbed Reid “Harrah Reid” as a result of the big casino contributions.
The irony in all of this is that neither Reid nor the Vegas casinos backed online gambling just a few years ago.
Harrahs runs the World Series of Poker and realized the power of Internet poker qualifiers. It was hit especially hard after online poker prohibition went into effect October of 2006.
- Chris Costigan, Gambling911.com Publisher
