Case 3:25-cv-02016-VDO Document 56-1 Filed 01/16/26 Page 24 of 29
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 have established regulatory schemes for sports betting under their traditional police powers. As explained, in Connecticut, the Connecticut Tribes and the State have forged comprehensive agreements resulting in a cooperative regulatory scheme for both in-person and online sports betting. 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. Kalshi’s position that Congress legalized sports betting in 2010 would 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 Kalshi’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, Kalshi’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. Ignoring history, context, and common sense, Kalshi presents an alternate reality in which a statutory scheme whose scope is limited to addressing the risk, discovery, and dissemination of commodity pricing information, see 7 U.S.C. § 5(a)–(b), exclusively governs nationwide sports betting, including that occurring on Indian lands. Kalshi, therefore, creates a
24
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs