USCA4 Appeal: 25-1892
Doc: 44
Filed: 12/22/2025
Pg: 33 of 39
PASPA’s nationwide sports-betting prohibition in 2010 “indicates that Congress did not mean to regulate the issue in the way [Kalshi] claim[s].” Id. at 297. 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 Maryland) have established regulatory schemes for sports betting under their traditional police powers. But that has no bearing on whether Congress’s CEA amendments in 2010 had the effect of obliterating PASPA 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 479–480. 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
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