Utah Senator to promote anti-sports betting bill
US Sen. Orrin Hatch announced that he’ll introduce a bill to make sports gambling illegal, hours after the Supreme Court revoked PASPA.
US.- The gambling industry celebrated on Monday the Supreme Court’s decision to revoke the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992 but the news wasn’t received by US Senator. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) who has already announced that he will introduce a new bill to make sports gambling illegal nationwide.
“At stake here is the very integrity of sports. That’s why I plan to introduce legislation in the coming weeks to help protect honesty and principle in the athletic arena,” said Hatch just hours after the SCOTUS decision. He was one of the original authors of PASPA, which explains his reaction over the potential legalisation of the segment on a federal level.
“The rapid rise of the Internet means that sports betting across state lines is now just a click away,” Hatch added and stated: “We cannot allow this practice to proliferate amid uneven enforcement and a patchwork race to the regulatory bottom.”
He probably won’t go that far as state legislatures are already considering sports betting legalisation and some have even passed their own bills already, which makes an updated ban highly unlikely.
