Opinion analysis: Justices strike down federal sports gambling law (Updated)

The 10th Amendment provides that, if the Constitution does not either give a power to the federal government or take that power away from the nations, that power has been reserved for the states or the people themselves. The Supreme Court has long interpreted this provision to bar the federal government from”commandeering” the countries to enforce national legislation or laws. Now the justices ruled that a federal law that bars states from legalizing sports gambling violates the anti-commandeering philosophy. Their decision not only opens the door for countries around the country to allow sports betting, but it also could give considerably more power to states generally, on topics ranging from the decriminalization of marijuana to sanctuary towns.
The federal law at issue in the case is the skilled and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which dates back to 1992. The law, known as PASPA, bans most states out of (among other things) authorizing sports betting; it carved out an exception which could have permitted New Jersey to establish a sports-betting scheme in the state’s casinos, provided that the nation did so within a year. However, it took New Jersey 20 years to behave: In 2012, the state legislature passed a law which legalized sports gambling.
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The National Collegiate Athletic Association and the four major professional sports leagues went into court, arguing that the 2012 law violated PASPA. The lower federal courts agreed, prompting the New Jersey legislature to return to the drawing board. In 2014, it passed a new law which gathered back present bans on sports gambling, at least as they applied to New Jersey casinos and racetracks. The NCAA and the leagues returned into court, arguing that the new law also violated PASPA, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit ruled against the nation.
The Supreme Court agreed to look at the state’s constitutional challenge to PASPA, and today the court reversed. In a decision by Justice Samuel Alito, the court began by explaining that the”anticommandeering doctrine may sound arcane, but it is just the expression of a fundamental structural conclusion incorporated into the Constitution” –“that the choice to withhold from Congress the power to issue orders directly into the States.” And that, nearly all lasted, is precisely the issue with the supply of PASPA that the nation challenged, which bars states from sports gambling: It”unequivocally dictates what a state legislature could and might not perform.” “It’s like” the majority indicated,”federal officers were installed in state legislative chambers and were armed with the ability to stop legislators from voting on any busting proposals. A more direct affront to state sovereignty,” Alito reasoned,”is not easy to envision.”
The court also rejected the argument, made by the championships as well as the national government, the PASPA provision barring states from authorizing sports gambling doesn’t”commandeer” the states, but rather simply supersedes any state laws that conflict with the supply — a legal doctrine called pre-emption. Pre-emption, the majority explained,”is based on a national law that regulates the behaviour of private actors,” but here”there is just no way to comprehend the provision prohibiting state authorization as anything other than a direct command to the States,” that”is just what the anticommandeering rule doesn’t allow.”
Having determined the PASPA provision barring states from authorizing sports gambling is unconstitutional, the majority then turned to the question that followed from this conclusion: If the rest of PASPA be struck down as well, or will the law survive without the anti-authorization provision? In legal terms, the question is known as”severability,” and today six of the seven justices — Alito together with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch — who consented the PASPA anti-authorization supply was unconstitutional also agreed that the entire law should collapse. They reasoned that, when the pub on states authorizing or licensing sports betting were invalid, it would be”most unlikely” that Congress would have wanted to continue to prevent the states from running sports lotteries, which were considered as”much more benign than other kinds of gambling.” In the same way, the majority posited, if Congress had understood the pub on state authorization or performance of sports betting will be struck down, it wouldn’t have wanted the parallel ban on the performance of sports-betting strategies by private entities to continue. The PASPA provision barring the promotion of sports gambling met the exact same fate; otherwise, the court explained,”federal law could forbid the promotion of an activity that’s legal under both state and federal law, and that is something which Congress has rarely done.”
The majority acknowledged that the question of whether to legalize sports betting”is a contentious one” which”requires an important policy choice.” But that choice, the majority continued,”isn’t ours to create. Congress can regulate sports betting directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act by itself.”
Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion in which he focused not on the substance of the court’s ruling but instead on a rather subjective legal question: the viability of the court’s present severability doctrine. Thomas made clear that he combined the majority’s decision striking down most PASPA since”it gives us the ideal answer it could for this question, and no party has asked us to apply a different test.” However he proposed that the court should, at some stage later on, rethink its severability doctrine, which he characterized as”dubious.” To begin with, he observedthe doctrine is contrary to the tools that courts normally use to translate laws since it takes a “`nebulous query into hypothetical congressional intent,”’ instructing judges to attempt and work out what Congress would have wanted to do if part of a law violated the Constitution, when”it appears improbable that the enacting Congress had any intention on this query.” Second, he continued, the philosophy”often requires courts to weigh in on statutory provisions that no party has” a legal right to battle.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg filed a dissenting opinion. Ginsburg did not elaborate on her apparent conclusion (combined in full by Justice Sonia Sotomayor) that PASPA’s pub on the authorization of sports betting from the nations does not violate the Constitution. Instead, she argued (also with assistance from Justice Stephen Breyer) that, even though PASPA’s anti-authorization supply is unconstitutional, the remaining portion of the law should stay in force. “On no logical ground,” Ginsburg highlighted,”can it be concluded that Congress would have preferred no statute at all if it couldn’t prohibit States from authorizing or licensing these schemes.”
New Jersey has long estimated that enabling sports gambling would revive the state’s struggling racetracks and casinos. In March of this year, ESPN projected that if New Jersey were to triumph, the state might have legal sports gambling by the time football season kicks off in the fall; almost two dozen other states are also considering bills that would enable sports betting. The financial impact of allowing sports betting cannot be understated: Legal sports gambling in Las Vegas takes in more than $5 billion annually, and many estimates place the value of illegal sports betting in the United States at up to $100 billion.
Today’s ruling may also have a much broader reach, possibly affecting a range of topics that bear little similarity to sports gambling. By way of instance, fans of so-called”sanctuary cities” — towns that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration officials to enforce immigration laws — have cited the 10th Amendment in recent challenges to the national government’s efforts to implement states on grants for state and local law enforcement. Challenges to the federal government’s recent efforts to enforce federal marijuana laws in states that have legalized the drug for either recreational or medical use may also be dependent on the 10th Amendment.

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