The Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling (CSIG) held a press conference in Washington on Wednesday in a bid to drum up support for the Restoration of America’s Wire Act (RAWA), which seeks to ban most forms of online gambling in the US of A.
The press conference was intended to boost awareness of the House of Representatives’ version of RAWA, which was introduced in February by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT). The conference was promoted in a media handout that hilariously mistook the word “implantation” as meaning “implementation,” but if Chaffetz was embarrassed to share a stage with CSIG’s grammatically-challenged dullards, he didn’t let on.
Chaffetz, who presided over an extremely biased House hearing on RAWA in March, told reporters that his aim was to reverse the 2011 Department of Justice opinion that – correctly, in most impartial observers’ eyes – limited the Wire Act’s scope to online sports betting, thereby allowing individual states the freedom to decide for themselves what kind of online gambling their citizens can enjoy.
As written, RAWA would force the three states currently offering online wagering to cease and desist, although RAWA would uphold the carveouts for online horserace wagering and fantasy sports that were included in the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA).