Shelley Berkley and the PPA

The Poker Players Alliance has done some wacky things before (see Grange95's series of posts here, for example), but today they have added another whopper: They are supporting Shelley Berkley for a Senate seat. See article in the Sun here.

Why is this wacky? Because she voted for the UIGEA, the very thing that has brought online poker down. It's true that she said at the time of her vote that she didn't like it, but in the end, when she had to make the call one way or the other, she voted in favor of passage of the final bill.

To me, that's unforgivable. I would think that the bare minimum requirement for getting political support from the PPA would be that you have not voted to kill online poker. There I go, being all unreasonable again. "Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who!"

The reporter for the Sun is guilty of either failing to do the most basic research, or deliberately withholding information that is crucial for a reader to make an informed judgment. He lets Berkley get away with what is literally a half-truth:

[Senator Dean] Heller hasn’t had the chance to prove his word on Internet poker: He wasn’t in Congress in 2006 when the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act — the measure that outlawed transactions of bets — was passed.

Berkley was, and sounded the alarm against it.

“I’m not a stranger to this issue. I stepped up very early, in the early part of my congressional tenure, and I’ve been working on this issue for a decade,” she said. “I was one of the few people who stood up during the port security debate and spoke out against adding this provision in — the ban on Internet gaming — from the start.”

It's true that she spoke against adding the UIGEA to the Safe Ports bill. I remember her floor speech about it. But in the end, she voted for the final bill. She voted to kill online gaming--a fact that she conveniently fails to mention in this news story. There's just no getting around that fact. Speaking against a bill and then voting for it is trying to have it both ways. It demonstrates an utter lack of courage, conviction, and principle. The last thing we need in Washington is more unprincipled legislators. They're worthless. They cannot be trusted to do the right thing when the heat is on. Kick 'em out of office and never let 'em back in. Rep. Berkley had one chance to get this right, and she blew it. Done, end of story, end of political career, as far as I'm concerned.

Ms. Berkley, it's swell that you're looking to repair the damage now, but it would have been a lot better if you and your peers had grown a spine and had said "no" to that awful piece of legislation to begin with. You helped make this mess. I absolutely do not trust you now when you say that you want to clean it up. It's too late for that. You betrayed us. You stabbed us in the back. You are one of the bad guys. Your voting records shows that you are an enemy of personal liberty.

And don't bother trying the old line about the UIGEA having been attached to "must-pass" legislation. In the first place, the Safe Ports act was just another round of security theater, a piece of show legislation. Does anybody really believe that our ports are now meaningfully safer than they were before 2006? Of course not. The only sense in which that was "must-pass" legislation is that everybody was afraid of what political opponents would say if they voted no. "She's opposed to making our ports safe!" Well, tough. Deal with that when and if it happens. And if you lose the next election on that basis, so what? You still would have done the right thing. If you're willing to cast votes contrary to your principles because you're worried about what distortions somebody might make of your record, then that means that you care more about reelection than doing what's right for your nation and for your constituents. If that's the case, what the hell good are you, and why in the world should we trust you?

In the second place, if the "safe ports" portion of the bill really was necessary, and if everybody or nearly everybody in Congress agreed with that assessment, then you and all of the others could have voted to kill the amended bill, knowing that the ports provisions would have been reintroduced and would have sailed through on their own in short order later. Of course, that would have required that you vote in accordance with your speech, which is apparently too much to expect of you.

In the third place, consider this hypothetical: Suppose that what had been tacked on to the ports act was not the UIGEA but a provision to send to the states a constitutional amendment repealing the Bill of Rights. It's an outrageous hypothetical, obviously, but it has a point. Would anybody have voted for that amended bill? I doubt it. They would have angrily denounced the unthinkable provision that had been attached, killed the bill, and insisted that a clean, unamended version of the ports act be reintroduced. Ms. Berkley and the others presumably would have judged that not killing the Bill of Rights was more important than the ports provisions. The fact that she did not take the same course of action with the UIGEA proves, in my view, that she considered people's right to use their time and money as they see fit to be much less important than getting the ports act through. Put another way, she does not value my freedom very highly.

Berkley is a demonstrated enemy of online gaming. Her vote was one of the ones that caused all of the current crisis. I consider that an absolute deal-breaker. It stuns me that the PPA would support somebody who actively helped cause the problem they are now trying to fix. I just don't get it.