California’s senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, reportedly voiced her opposition to the latest online poker legalisation attempt in California – Assembly Bill 2863 – prior to its consideration by the Assembly’s Governmental Organization Committee last week (see previous report).
In a letter to the Speaker of the Assembly, Anthony Rendon, and the president of the Senate, Kevin de Leon, the 83-year-old Democratic Party Senator emphasised her strong opposition to the bill and went on to list the general but unsubstantiated perils of online poker in a memo that looked very much as if it had come from the repetitive pens of writers at Sheldon Adelson’s Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling.
The tone and content of the correspondence, much of which has been repeatedly, factually and scientifically refuted, had a familiar ring.
That’s hardly surprising, given Feinstein’s well-documented political and personal support for both the CSIG and Adelson’s other pet project, the Restoration of America’s Wire Act.
Her attempt to derail AB 2863 failed spectacularly however; the months of work that proposer Adam Gray devoted to creating a workable consensus among a diversity of interested parties paid off when the bill was advanced on an overwhelming 18 vs. 0 vote by the committee.
AB 2863 is still not a done deal, with important areas still to be agreed and fleshed out (see previous reports) but it will clearly take more than dated misinformation from the CSIG and Feinstein to kill it off.