Case: 1:25-cv-15406 Document #: 43-1 Filed: 01/30/26 Page 14 of 17 PageID #:380
Coinbase’s argument that the CEA’s 2010 amendments authorized sports betting nationwide and the existence of PASPA’s nationwide sports-betting prohibition in 2010 therefore indicates that Congress could not have intended to regulate sports betting in the way that Coinbase now claims. “Given this history and the breadth of the authority that [Coinbase] has asserted [the CFTC has],” this Court should not defer to Coinbase’s “expansive construction” of the CEA. Id. at 160. The Supreme Court eliminated PASPA as a barrier to sports betting in 2018 when it held PASPA unconstitutional. See Murphy , 584 U.S. at 486. Since then, several states, including Illinois, have established regulatory schemes for sports betting under their traditional police powers. See 11 Ill. Adm. Code §§ 1900.110–1900.1740. But that has no bearing on whether Congress’s CEA amendments in 2010 had the effect of obliterating PASPA (and IGRA), and the state laws on which it relied. Coinbase’s position that Congress legalized sports betting in 2010 would have certainly come as a surprise to the Supreme Court and litigants in Murphy —none of whom seemed to think that the state prohibition at issue had actually been preempted years earlier. In holding PASPA unconstitutional, the Supreme Court made no suggestion that Congress had already preempted all state gaming laws eight years earlier. Murphy , 584 U.S. at 479–80. To the contrary, the majority opinion concluded with an observation utterly incompatible with Coinbase’s contention: “The legalization of sports gambling requires an important policy choice, but the choice is not ours to make. Congress can regulate sports gambling directly, but if it elects not to do so, each State is free to act on its own.” Id. at 486. In other words, Coinbase’s deregulatory elephant was hidden in a statutory mousehole far too small for the Supreme Court to notice when deciding whether sports betting would be legal.
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