It may be early in the game, but the first official look from members of Congress into sports betting in America in the post-PASPA era indicated a clear tilt toward some form of federal oversight.
Five witnesses were invited to testify last Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security. Before a one had spoken, however, Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, after professing himself a diehard Green Bay Packers-Milwaukee Brewers fan, set the tone of the hearing with his “personal view” that gambling, by virtue of the large amounts of money involved, poses a direct threat to the integrity of sports.
As he put it, “We’re going to be in for huge amounts of trouble in the future.”
He then went on to broadly outline the legislative landscape as he sees it in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s May ruling in Murphy v. NCAA striking down the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act
