After this week’s hearing on Barney Frank’s (D-MA) bill HR 2267, Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection and Enforcement Act, which seeks to legalize and regulate online gambling, a markup hearing has now been scheduled for Tuesday July 27th. A markup hearing is where the committee makes amendments and changes to a piece of legislation and then votes on whether it will be brought to the floor of the House of Representatives for a full vote.

There is still a long way to go before the bill even makes it out of committee, let alone gets sent to the House floor for a full vote: One amendment being tossed around is the idea of setting a stop-loss limit on how much a player can lose can lose in a predetermined amount of time.

In my opinion –I follow politics as closely as poker—it’s unlikely the bill would make it to the House floor until after the mid-term elections in November. The reason I say this is that the issue at hand, online gambling, is important at the party’s base, so while most people couldn’t care about the bill one way or the other, for the vocal minority of both the Democrats and Republicans the issue is very important, and most politicians will not make a tough vote on these type of issues in an election year –they have to appease their base.

Tags: barney frank, Internet Gambling Regulation

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 11:47 am and is filed under Legal Poker News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.