Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire owner of the Sands casino in Vegas, has been “spend(ing) whatever it takes” — his words — to secure passage of pet legislation titled the Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA), but the bill has nothing to do with restoring anyone’s wires.
It has a lot to do with pulling strings, though.
RAWA was written to outlaw online gaming by making it illegal for transactions to occur across state lines, via the Internet.
That’s where the “wire” part comes in. As in wire transfer. A person physically located in, for instance, New Jersey – which has legalized online gaming – couldn’t participate in a game whose servers or business headquarters were located in some other state.
But the original 1961 Wire Act act was written to thwart mafia transfers of illicit money across state lines. The “restoration” act being hard-sold by Adelson — who has given generously to political action commitees with close ties to the Republican congressional leadership — specifically targets legal online gaming.
Which just happens to be his competition.
By making it more difficult — if not impossible — to participate in gaming via computer, from anywhere — RAWA would protect the business monopoly of Adelson’s bricks-and-mortars casinos.
And “monopoly” is exactly the right word.
It’s not a monopoly when a business has a large share of the market based on the merits – on the market freely choosing to buy what it sells over what competitors sell. And when rivals are not legally prevented from attempting to compete.
Adelson wants to use Congress to keep people from freely doing business with his legal competition. He wants to effectively force people to pack up and come to Vegas if they want to gamble.
To spend money at his hotels and casinos. Apparently because $32.2 billion — the man’s net worth, according to Forbes — just isn’t enough for a geriatric billionaire to get by on. The Restoration of America’s Wire Act is as silly as a law forbidding cell phones, in order to preserve the monopoly of land lines and corded wall phones.
Another problem with RAWA that has bubbled up is that it would also make it illegal for people to purchase state lottery tickets online – that being a form of “online gaming,” too. Notwithstanding it’s not only legal and regulated but sanctioned by the states that have lotteries.
RAWA is so egregiously pay-to-prevent-play that more than 90 percent of attendees at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) just outside Washington denounced RAWA as a lurid example of crony capitalism – the use of government power to enrich private interests – as well as an attack on the 10th Amendment, which expressly limits the authority of the federal government to the powers enumerated in the Constitution, leaving everything else to the discretion of the states.
One of the CPAC attendees was Andrew Langer, president of the Institute for Liberty – who openly criticized Adelson by name: “RAWA is nothing short of an effort by one of the richest men in the world to ban a form of competition for his bricks-and-mortar casino empire,” he said.
“And everyone knows it.”
“Worse yet, he is willing to trample on the Constitution to do it.”
Gambling (bricks-and-mortar as well as online) is not prohibited anywhere in the Constitution. And it is pefectly legal in Arizona, Nevada, Delaware and several other states.
That comports with the 10th Amendment’s principle of delegated authority, that the people who live in each state ought to be the ones who decide about such things, not far-away bureaucrats in Washington.
Another worry about RAWA is that the precedent set, if it were to become law, could be used in the future to target the sale of ammunition online.
The Feds could impose another one-size-fits-all fatwa, eviscerating not only the 10th Amendment’s guarantees but also severely limiting the Second Amendment.
For these reasons, almost no one supports RAWA . .. except Sheldon Adelson.
In addition to the Institute for Liberty, several other heavyweight conservative activist groups and think tanks have called out the Adelson Protection Act – whoops, the Restoration of America’s Wire Act – including the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the American Conservative Union.
But his voice carries, because it’s amplified by the megaphone of his millions.
According to the Washington Post and other reports, he has put at least $20 milliion toward passage of RAWA.
Clearly, it’s very important to him. Billions adding up to more than millions. Republicans — who now control all three branches of government — have an opportunity to get things done . . . or get things done for wire-pulling donors like Sheldon Adelson.
The choice they make will determine whether they hold on to those three branches in the years to come.
Eric Peters is an automotive journalist and author.
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