Sports gambling clash at US supreme court unites Trump, NFL

Christie speaks during a news conference 

All it took to bring Donald Trump and the National Football League together was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and his Supreme Court bid to legalize sports gambling.

The NFL, a target of the president’s Twitter ire over national anthem protests, is banding together with the administration to fight the outgoing governor in a case the high court will hear Monday.

It’s an unusual pairing in a case full of odd alignments and high stakes. New Jersey is seeking to overturn the 1992 federal law that bars single-game sports gambling in every state except Nevada. Should that effort succeed, other states could move quickly to grab part of the USD150 billion the casino-backed American Gaming Association says is wagered illegally every year.

New Jersey wagering advocates say legalization could revitalize Atlantic City, the gambling center where Trump once owned casinos. Among the most ardent proponents is Christie, whose support for Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign was part of an on-again, off-again relationship that almost resulted in a cabinet position.

The nation’s largest pro sports leagues and the National Collegiate Athletic Association are leading the fight against the state, even as some of them inch closer to embracing gambling themselves. National Basketball Association Commissioner Adam Silver has said that Congress should let states authorize wagering, subject to strict regulation and technical safeguards.

“There is an obvious appetite among sports fans for a safe and legal way to wager on professional sporting events,” Silver wrote in the New York Times in 2014.

New Jersey has been trying to legalize sports gambling in its casinos for years, starting with a 2012 law that explicitly authorized wagering. Federal courts struck down that measure as violating the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sport Protection Act, or PASPA. That law says states other than Nevada may not “sponsor, operate, advertise, promote, license or authorize by law or compact” a sports-gambling system.

New Jersey then took a less direct approach by exempting racetracks and Atlantic City casinos from its gambling prohibition but not explicitly authorizing wagering or setting up a new regulatory system. A Philadelphia- based federal appeals court voted 10-2 to strike down that law as well, siding with the leagues and the federal government, then controlled by the Obama administration. Bloomberg