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Originally Posted by RonMexico
LOL. Well, GJGE Jersey.
The hand isn't over, the DOJ's call just eliminated a lot of NJ's outs, and losing to the leagues would likely not have taken them out of sports betting game, but the DOJ has has them covered.
The whole case should now come down to one question, while the courts have held that Congress can not commandeer State officials to take action on their behalf to enforce Federal policy, is Congress also overreaching by commandeering State officials to prevent them from taking action to enforce their own public policy?
Had Congress simply outlawed gambling on sports in all fifty States (a B&M Wire Act) there might not be an effective challenge, but their desire to grandfather NV (and ironically NJ) left the statute vulnerable, but likely not for the reasons most seem to believe.
Nelson Rose is often quoted as saying that PASPA is equivalent to Congress passing a law which says that only NV can have movie theaters with sound, but had the technology for sound been developed at a time when that such a law wouldn't have been patently absurd, it wouldn't be the lack of uniformity that would make such a law unconstitutional.
If Congress offered some rational basis for the need to protect the silent movie industry from competition, along with a rational purpose for excluding NV from the prohibition, the law might have stood as the courts have found no textual basis for uniform application of Commerce Clause authority.
One reason which would likely make a law forbidding States from licensing movie theaters with sound unconstitutional isn't that it's unfair or unequal, it's that Congress' attempt to appear fair and equal by not actually prohibiting sound movies in all but one State (because that State already had sound movies) led them to choose unconstitutional commandeering rather than constitutional preemption.
The other reason such a law against sound movies would have eventually been found unconstitutional is that the technology to view sound movies eventually made it's way into peoples homes, making what might have been viewed as a rational basis for prohibiting sound movies at some point, an objectively silly statute that accomplishes nothing but create a black market for home movies with sound.
In 1992, prohibiting public sports betting to protect the 'national past-time' may have been rational, in 2013 (given home access via the internet) many would argue that betting on sports outcomes or fantasy performances may actually be more of a national past-time than watching them, and the protected team sports leagues (professional individual sports aren't protected under PASPA) may soon not even be the most popular (UFC?).
NJ is no longer the favorite but they have at least two outs, the courts may view the rationale behind a sports betting prohibition in a post-internet world as archaic, or agree with NJ that commanding State officials not to enact legislation is by definition commandeering.