U.S. judge strikes down FL's Seminole Gaming Compact, deals blow to DeSantis [View all]
A federal judge has undone a signature achievement of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ time in office by invalidating the Seminole Gaming Compact, a deal between the state and the tribe that purported to OK statewide sports betting and bring billions of dollars to state coffers.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich in Washington, D.C., ruled that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, in allowing the gambling deal to take effect in August, violated the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA), by allowing sports betting to take place throughout the state as long as the bets were processed by computer servers on tribal lands.
The state referred to that arrangement, with remote bets feeding into central servers, as “hub and spoke.”
But Friedrich ruled that the federal law defines ‘Indian lands’ literally.
“[A]lthough the compact deems all sports betting to occur at the location of the tribe’s sports book and supporting servers … this court cannot accept that fiction. When a federal statute authorizes an activity only at specific locations, parties may not evade that limitation by deeming their activity to occur where it, as a factual matter, does not,” Friedrich wrote in an opinion released Monday evening.
Read more: https://floridaphoenix.com/2021/11/23/u-s-judge-strikes-down-fls-seminole-gaming-compact-deals-blow-to-desantis/
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