Legal Sports Betting May Happen Soon Due to Potential Trump Nominee

Miguel Estrada (a partner with a law firm that represented New Jersey's quest for legalized sports gambling) is reportedly a leading candidate to be the Solicitor General nominee.

New Jersey passed a statewide voter referendum to legalize sports betting in 2011. The sports leagues sued the state of New Jersey as their legislation violated a federal law that bans sports betting, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA), in every state other than Nevada, Delaware, Montana, and Oregon. In response, the state of New Jersey appealed the constitutionality of this decision through the federal courts. Their attornies contested, to no avail, that PASPA violates the 10th Amendment.

New Jersey appealed this decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to take their case. However, the U.S. Supreme Court recently asked the Solicitor General to file a brief with more details. In other words, one or more of the justices seem to be interested in this case. Therefore, if the new U.S. Solicitor General believes that there is merit to New Jersey's appeal, then there is a good chance that the U.S. Supreme Court would hear their case. Hence, whoever is appointed as the next U.S. Solicitor General could have a major impact on the future of sports gambling.

Photo (Wikimedia Commons)

Chuck Cooper (a D.C.-based attorney with connections to Trump and Jeff Sessions) was reportedly the first choice of President Trump. However, Cooper has since withdrawn his name for consideration due to the negativity associated with the nomination process for Jeff Sessions.

According to law.com, Miguel Estrada is now the likely frontrunner for the job. He's an especially relevant name with this issue because he's a partner with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. That firm has received over $6 million to represent New Jersey's challenge against PASPA. In fact, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher has been somewhat of a nemesis to the NFL. Their firm represented the NFL Players' Union during the players' strike of 2011 and an anti-trust civil suit of 2009. In addition, their firm issued this report that was critical of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA) due to its burdens on financial institutions.

Estrada has yet to be named as the nominee, but he worked in the Office of the Solicitor General during the George W. Bush administration. With that said, like Chuck Cooper, Estrada may now be reluctant to go through the nomination process. Estrada was nominated in 2001 by George W. Bush for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He was aggressively filibustered by the Democrats because he was part of the infamous U.S. Supreme Court case, Bush v Gore, which decided the 2000 Presidential election. Ultimately, Estrada withdrew his name from consideration and he returned to Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.

To sum up, the news of Miguel Estrada as the next potential U.S. Solicitor General is promising news if you're a supporter of legalized sports gambling. Maybe this issue will be finally legislated on a state by state basis.

Crony Capitalism; Private Prison Stocks Have Doubled Since the Election

Update 2-23-2017   
It's official. Jeff  Sessions overruled the Obama administration's ruling to phase out private prison contractors for federal prisons. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------- 

This is an update from a previous post about the explosive rise of the private prison industry. That article included a call to action for everyone to contact the Senate switchboard and protest Jeff Session’s confirmation. The Senate switchboard was overloaded with calls from like-minded activists, but Sessions was ultimately confirmed by the Senate to be the U.S. Attorney General. With that said, his confirmation was expected as the Republicans have the numbers. However, even the libertarian-leaning Rand Paul (R-KY) voted for Sessions. 

Meanwhile, the stock prices of the top two private prisons, GEO Group and CoreCivic (formerly CCA), have continued rising. Their share prices have increased by 100% and 140% respectively in the three and a half months since Election Day. 

(via Google Finance)

There’s no other way to look this development; it’s crony capitalism. Their industry is entirely dependent upon government contracting, which is influenced by strategic political donations. Both companies donated to Republicans over Democrats at a 9 to 1 ratio. 

For several years, neither company was held accountable for their poor track records. However, in August of last year, the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Justice issued a comprehensive review of the private prisons that house federal prisoners. The IG report concluded that private prisons don’t offer significant savings to the taxpayers and there were more violent incidents in those facilities. One month later, a DOJ official announced that they planned to no longer issue contracts to private prison companies for federal prisons.

One day after that IG report was issued, a subsidiary of the GEO Group, GEO Corrections Holdings Inc, made a $100,000 donation to Donald Trump’s PAC, Rebuilding America Now. In reaction, a watchdog group, Campaign Legal Center, issued a formal complaint with the Federal Election Committee (FEC). Their group contends that the GEO Group violated a federal law that bars companies from making political donations while holding or negotiating a federal contract. 

A company spokesperson for the GEO Group pointed out that their subsidiary that made the donation, GEO Corrections Holdings Inc, which doesn’t have any federal contracts. The FEC has yet to make a decision. However, in the end, the GEO Group will likely avoid any penalties due to this technicality. Their company may not be guilty according to the letter of the law, but they are clearly guilty of violating the intent of the law. 

We can all agree that crony capitalism is alive and well in America. 

Has the drug war rhetoric improved from the days of Teddy Roosevelt?

On this day in history, (February 13, 1905), Teddy Roosevelt delivered his “Lincoln Dinner” speech

Theodore Roosevelt

at the Republican Club in New York City. Roosevelt honored Lincoln’s legacy and he insisted that race relations needed to be improved throughout the country. This was a historic speech that represented genuine progress. However, he expressed himself in ways that revealed a deeper truth about the prevailing opinions about race at that time.

Roosevelt referred to white people as the “forward race” and he felt that it was their responsibility to train the “backward race” to fit within American culture and gain prosperity. He listed various issues, but Roosevelt was particularly concerned with morality, crime, and drug abuse. He said:

Laziness and shiftlessness, these, and, above all, vice and criminality of every kind, are evils more potent for harm to the black race than all acts of oppression of white men put together. 

Roosevelt’s condescension for other races wasn’t limited to black people. He was a firm believer in eugenics, which was a form of propaganda that was posed as “scientific proof” of the superiority of the white race. Eugenics was quite popular in the early 20^th century. Hence, many Americans believed that drugs needed to be outlawed to protect “inferior” races from themselves.

Teddy Roosevelt signed the first federal anti-drug law, the Opium Exclusion Act of 1909. The law didn’t explicitly target Chinese immigrants, but the intent was implicit. Numerous newspapers proclaimed that Chinese men were using opium to lure white women into sexual slavery. It was a contrived moral panic that was manufactured by the media, but there was some truth to higher addiction rates among Chinese immigrants. However, practically no Americans newspapers were critical of the American families that made fortunes selling opium in China. That includes Warren Delano Jr., the grandfather of Franklin R. Roosevelt.

With that said, let’s continue reviewing Teddy Roosevelt’s speech from this day in history. You have to put a speech within the context of the time period. Even though Roosevelt expressed some clearly racist viewpoints, in fairness, the overall tone of Roosevelt’s speech was quite progressive for this time period. Albeit, it was a very low benchmark. For example, Roosevelt noted in his speech:

I am glad to say that during the last three months the (reports)…show a smaller number of lynchings than for any other three months during the last twenty years.

What will historians have to say about our current era? The punishments are less severe, and the political rhetoric has changed. However, the discriminatory nature of drug laws hasn’t improved much over the course of 100 years. In fact, there is now a higher percentage of black men in prison in America than there were in South Africa during Apartheid. A disproportionate percentage of blacks and Latinos are serving prison sentences for crimes even though all races use/sell drugs at relatively equal rates.  

Teddy Roosevelt openly asserted that minorities needed to be protected from themselves. On the other hand, no current politician can make such claims, but that doesn’t mean that a sizeable group of voters wouldn’t like to see a resurgence of Jim Crow. After all, everyone knows that white people won’t be targeted with the “stop and frisk” programs that Donald Trump supports. Furthermore, it would be Chicago’s black and Latino neighborhoods that would be converted into official police states if Trump made good on his threat of “bringing in the Feds.” Yes, that’s the same condescending racial tone that was more openly asserted over 100 years ago.

How do you think historians will describe our current era?

2,000 out of 6,000 Federal Whistleblowers Allegedly Face Retaliation

A Russian propaganda news organization, Sputnik News, broke this story last week. Obviously, Russia has a vested interest in exposing the weaknesses of our political system. Then again, all Americans benefit from transparency and this was a story that virtually no American news outlet covered properly. 

The House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations listened to testimony about the effectiveness of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, which went into effect five years ago. The committee questioned Robert Storch, the Deputy Inspector General and Whistleblower Ombudsman of the DOJ. Also, representatives from two non-profit whistleblower organizations, Elizabeth Hempowicz (Counsel for the Project on Government Oversight) and Tom Devine (Director of the Government Accountability Project) stressed the importance of providing transparency and protection for whistleblowers.

However, Sputnik News picked up on this alarming exchange between Rep. Rod Blum (R-IA) and Eric Bachman, the Deputy Special Counsel for Litigation and Legal Affairs of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC). Federal whistleblowers can send information about potential government waste, fraud, and abuse to the OSC. The OSC also collects reports from whistleblowers who claim to have faced retaliation for reporting such conduct. 

Representative Blum asked Bachman how many whistleblowers contacted their agency and how many allegedly faced retaliation. Bachman replied that there were six-thousand federal whistleblowers last year and two-thousand of them allegedly faced retaliation. Almost every one of these cases of retaliation came from one of the whistleblower’s supervisors. Bachman estimated that of those 2,000 cases of alleged retaliation, their agency was able to gain favorable outcomes in 200 cases. Worst of all, both Blum and Bachman agree that the people who commit these retaliatory acts, in most cases, are rarely held accountable. In fact, they often receive promotions.

Bachman’s testimony revealed both good and bad news. As a result of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, more government employees are reporting acts of waste, fraud, and abuse. Due to this increased transparency, there is more accountability. Bachman mentioned the Veterans Health Administration (VA) had over 40 supervisors who were disciplined for wrongdoing via whistleblower reports.

However, some agencies have been particularly vengeful. For instance, the OSC received 243 complaints of whistleblower retaliation from employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) since December of 2012. Far more progress needs to be made to prevent whistleblower retaliation when 1 out of 3 allege that they’ve faced negative repercussions for merely doing their civic duty. We need a system that protects the public interest, not the bureaucracy. The formal process for reporting acts of government wrongdoing has been corrupted. This a vital service that is necessary for the future of our country. Hence, some government employees have found that there is no other recourse other than to contact the media. 

Look at what has happened with the intelligence community. The Obama administration prosecuted eight whistleblowers with the Espionage Act. The most egregious of those cases of whistleblower retaliation involved a former high-level NSA official, Thomas Drake. He, along with three other top NSA officials (Bill Binney, Kirk Weibe, and Ed Loomis), exhausted the formal process for reporting wrongdoing to no avail. In the end, all four had their homes raided by the FBI. However, only Drake was charged with violating the Espionage Act because he provided the government with copies of various documents. With that said, the documents he provided were available in the public domain; the government decided to mark those documents as “classified” after raiding his home. Ultimately, this witch-hunt fell flat and the government dropped the charges against Drake as long he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor offense of improper use of a government computer. 

Of the eight whistleblowers charged under the Espionage Act, Edward Snowden is the only other person to not serve time in prison and that’s because he fled the country. Most media coverage has centered on the debate over whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor. However, few news outlets have truly examined the actual whistleblower process. 

The former NSA Inspector General claimed that he would have protected Edward Snowden’s rights. However, Ellard was terminated last year due to retaliating against a different whistleblower. Hence, Thomas Drake, and his three fellow NSA colleagues (Bill Binney, Kirk Weibe, and Ed Loomis), told PBS Frontline that they felt Snowden’s actions were appropriate due to the government’s atrocious record with protecting whistleblowers.

This process needs to be corrected immediately. After all, transparency is clearly at the bottom of priorities for the new Trump administration that began issuing federal gag orders within the first week. Trump is more concerned with projecting an image of strong national security and law & order, not constitutional governance. Consequently, there will likely be various federal whistleblowers who choose to skip the formal process due to fears of retribution. Therefore, we may face situations with far worse security breaches than what happened with the Snowden leaks.

In a telling moment, Trump joked about “destroying the career” of a Texas official who wanted to overturn civil asset forfeiture, which allows the police to seize people’s assets without filing criminal charges. Civil asset forfeiture is opposed by 84% of Americans. Nonetheless, Trump was willing to offer such unflinching support for law enforcement even though he was completely unfamiliar with this issue and the resulting civil liberties implications. Needless to say, that was a very ominous sign of things to come.