zlacker

This article doesn't address it for whatever reason, but any discussion of sports betting in the US is going to have to deal with the actual reason PASPA was struck down. It was found to be unconstitutional. That doesn't mean sports betting needs to be universally legal across the entire country, and it isn't, but if you're going to make an argument that it should be legally banned, that has to be done on a state-by-state basis. The US Supreme Court, as an institution, changes its mind over time, but I'm not aware of any notable instance where exactly the same court only six years later reverses its own decision. Likely a few of these justices would need to die and be replaced by someone with a different legal opinion before change was possible.

You can make these kind of consequentialist arguments anyway. It's worthwhile discussion. But the legal decision itself wasn't made on a consequentialist basis. The court didn't decide PASPA was illegal because it was socially bad and we'd have a better world without it. The proposed "just ban it outright everywhere" can't happen under the current legal regime. It's fine to propose things that can't happen but we should acknowledge this becomes a hypothetical discussion.

>>noname+(OP)
The reason the PASPA was unconstitutional wasn't because the federal government can't regulate sportsbetting. It was due to the specifics of how the PASPA implemented the ban. In particular the authors of the PASPA wanted to "grandfather in" certain states so rather than making sportsbetting illegal nationwide/federally they made it illegal for state governments to pass new laws legalizing sportsbetting in their states (which meant that states which had legalized sportsbetting already could continue to allow it).

It was this "commandeering" of the state legislature's right to legislate that was found unconstitutional, not the federal government's ability to regulate sportsbetting. So if congress wanted they could pass a law that made sportsbetting illegal at the federal level and put a federal agency in charge of enforcing it.

Its similar to the legal weed situation. States can't be forced to enforce federal laws, but the federal government itself can enforce those laws even if the state governments are unwilling.