Newsweek Cover Story: Child Playing Online Poker and Dealing Parents a Bad Hand

This week’s cover story in Newsweek Magazine features a young boy holding a deck of cards with the caption “How Washington Opened the Floodgates to Online Gambling”.

The article headline itself goes a bit further with the headline: “How Washington Opened the Floodgates to Online Poker, Dealing Parents a Bad Hand”.

The article goes on to criticize former U.S. assistant attorney general Virginia Seitz 13-page legal opinion that reinterpreted the federal Wire Act to now exempt certain forms of gambling online such as poker and casino games.  This opinion opened the doors to individual states passing their own laws in order to license the activity, Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey being the first to do so.

George Washington University professor of public interest law, Jonathan Turley, tells Newsweek, Seitz did more than open the doors for states to begin allowing online gambling.  What she did was open a pandora’s box, he suggests.

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“That a single, relatively unknown person in an office at the Justice Department can just bring about such massive change to our economy in direct contradiction to what Congress sees as the governing law signals a gravitational shift in power that is very concerning,” says Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University in Washington.

“The Office of Legal Counsel once held a unique and revered position within the DOJ and government as a whole,” Turley continues. “It was viewed as the gold standard of legal analysis. This office was once tasked with the job of saying no to the president. Its job was to objectively interpret the intent of our laws passed by Congress. It had a tradition of independence and excellence, and that tradition was viewed as inviolate by past presidents. This was heavily damaged by the Bush administration, and this has only continued with Obama.”

Seitz declined comment when approached by Newsweek.

The article predictably goes on to discuss how the nation’s children are now vulnerable to the ills of online gambling.

Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz, a representative from Utah, co-authored a bill that would ultimately erase the Seitz decision.

“In the physical world of bricks-and-mortar casinos, it’s easy to see a 13-year-old on a casino floor.," he says.  "On the Internet, there are no physical barriers, nothing stopping a child from becoming an addict."

- Ace King, Gambling911.com