Thanks to competing gambling interests, members of a little-known legislative committee have received more than a million dollars in donations. But how did the cash infusion to this “juice committee” affect the votes of its members?
California tribal casinos won a key vote on a gambling bill – and more than a million dollars in campaign donations undoubtedly influenced that. That includes nearly one hundred thousand dollars in donations committee members received the week before the vote. Such a significant investment is an indication that business owners believe in their success. California may soon be able to join the list of alternatives to Las Vegas.
Private card rooms, which are competitors to tribal casinos, see the bill as an existential threat to both their businesses and city budgets across the state. They also donated company funds to committee members, but significantly less than tribal casinos – and lost the vote, even though they were supported by the committee chairwoman. She received the most money from the card rooms. But her support needed to be more – the bill required the votes of 12 out of 22 committee members to pass.
Even though lawmakers deny the impact of donations on the vote, the fact that two powerful interest groups showered committee members with so much money in the run-up to a critical vote shows that significant spending matters, and the public needs to realize that. It goes without saying that no politician will admit that their vote was influenced by money.
The vote demonstrated why such committees are called scoop committees – he’s just raising money. And the tribal casinos that won the vote, quite by accident, donated almost three times as much as the card rooms.
Tribes and card rooms have been vying for the market since voters approved an initiative in 2000 that gave tribes the right to negotiate with the state to run specific Las Vegas-style gambling on their lands.
The tribes claim that about 80 private gambling halls in the state are violating their exclusive gambling rights by illegally offering games such as blackjack, baccarat and pai gow poker. They claim hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen from historically disenfranchised tribal communities throughout California in this way.
With more and more people starting to gamble online, tribal casinos need no extra competition from private gambling halls. The growth of the iGaming sector puts a lot of pressure on land-based gambling establishments. After all, it is not only young players who play via the Internet, but also those who used to visit land-based casinos.
New gambling games that were unknown before make modern online casinos even more popular. Among such games, we can highlight Aviator, Jet-X, and Plinko. We checked how true these words are and found the website www play plinko org. It hosts several dozen online casinos where you can play Plinko for money and for free. And you can run it directly from your PC or smartphone for real money or for free.
Card Rooms, for its part, argues that the lobbying pressure it is facing from the state’s 70 tribal casinos is unfair. They say the card rooms’ annual revenue is barely 10 percent of what tribal casinos earn. But the bill in favor of tribal casinos passed on a voice vote. Next, the bill will be considered in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, another committee.
Recall that earlier, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz expressed his opinion on lootboxes. This method of monetization is criticized for its similarity to gambling