Florida Sports Betting Back On? & The Impact of Trump’s Justices – July 5th, 2023
- Hold the door. Sports betting just may be coming to Florida (again) after all. It’s now been well over two years since Governor DeSantis and the Seminole Tribe first struck a deal that would bring sports betting to Florida. It’s now been over 20 months since the Seminoles first opened up a sports betting app that Floridians could use. And it’s been about 19 months since a federal judge ended the Seminole sports betting app in its tracks, along with parimutuels seeking to participate much the same. It’s also been a year and a half since Draft Kings and Fan Duel conceded defeat on their attempted proposed constitutional amendment to bring sports betting to Florida after it’s PAC only collected a little over half of the needed signatures to qualify for last year’s ballot. And, as I recently covered, the news for those seeking to play in the not-so-distant future in Florida looked rather bleak as well as the most recent effort to get a proposed constitutional amendment on next year’s ballot is pacing far worse than the first. All of this is to say that the expectation for legal sports betting in Florida has looked bleak for quite a while. And the time horizon for when it might be possible appeared even recently to be many years into the future. But then Friday’s court ruling happened. And the ruling just might change everything for the prospect of sports betting in Florida. While most Floridians have been court watching recently, it’s been the historic Supreme Court rulings on key and transformative issues like Affirmative Action, President Biden’s student loan debt forgiveness plan, and religious liberty that’s rightly received most of our attention. But there was another federal court ruling on Friday which has the potential to bring sports betting in Florida back from the dead any day now. In a lawsuit brought about by two of Florida’s parimutuels, those behind the Magic City Casino and the Bonita Springs Poker Room, challenged the 2021 federal judges’ ruling which stopped the upstart sports betting operations in Florida...and in a ruling no one seemingly expected to come until it did on Friday...
- They won. Specifically, a three-judge panel of the US Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous ruling striking down the lower judge’s opinion which was rendered in November of 2021. In the majority opinion in the ruling, it stated: We see the case differently. (A compact) can legally authorize a tribe to conduct gaming only on its own lands. But at the same time, IGRA does not prohibit a gaming compact — which is, at bottom, an agreement between a tribe and a state — from discussing other topics, including those governing activities ‘outside Indian lands. Whether it is otherwise lawful for a patron to place bets from non-tribal land within Florida may be a question for that state’s courts, but it is not the subject of this litigation and not for us to decide. So, what does that mean? Two things, first there may and likely will be other legal challenges (the No Casino group which was behind previous constitutional amendment which created obstacles to implementing sporting betting in Florida has already indicated as much), second – at this very moment there doesn’t appear to be anything stopping the Seminoles from cranking their sports betting app back up just as they did in November of 2021. The question is whether they will choose to do so again until there’s more legal clarity surrounding the issue – lest there’s a different version of a similar thing that occurs a la the fall of ‘21. The Seminoles haven’t publicly commented as of yet, however a spokesman for Governor DeSantis has, saying: While we are not surprised the lower court’s perplexing ruling was unanimously overturned, this is great news for Florida. We will continue working with the Seminole Tribe of Florida to ensure the success of this historic compact -– the largest gaming compact in U.S. history -– which will lead to over $20 billion in revenues for the people of Florida. The issue is complicated, and many legal experts now expect this issue will land be the US Supreme Court, which if that were to happen, would mean there wouldn’t be any resolution to the matter this year. But what is clear is that if the Seminoles want to reopen the sports betting app there’s nothing stopping them from doing it today. So yeah, hold the door on sports betting in Florida. It just may soon be game on once again. And speaking of the Supreme Court...
- Making America Great Again. For most presidents who’ve come and gone historically, the greatest impact of their presidencies isn’t policy that’s signed into law during their administration... It’s the impact their justices have had on the Supreme Court which provides the greatest and longest lasting impact. President Trump had many significant policy achievements during his four years in office including the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, the USMCA, and the China trade tariffs. Policies that have proved so successful that even President Biden hasn’t sought to totally undo them. But there’s no doubt that as the presidential campaign is heating up along with the weather, Donald Trump’s greatest legacy has, in just two and a half years since he’s been out of office, been shown to be his three Supreme Court Justices. All three of Trump’s justices backed the overturning of Roe last year. All three justices backed the landmark, and in my view correct, rulings on Affirmative Action, executive overreach by President Biden on his proposed student loan debt forgiveness plan, and on religious liberty. And make no mistake that Trump, who is already in a commanding position in the Republican primary race, can and will point to the impact he’s already had on the country. And with the next president positioned to name additional Supreme justices, the proven impact he can have in the future. There are numerous ways in which a president can work in order to Make America Great Again. His justices are doing it even with Trump out of power – for now.