Online Gambling: A "Christmas Tree" Bill

Published: Sunday, October 15, 2006 Online-Casinos.com

ONLINE GAMBLING : HOW CONGRESS 'CHRISTMAS TREES' LEGISLATION

A fascinating snapshot of Washington political practice - but is it democratic?


Many online gamblers were infuriated by the political sleight-of-hand by which Senator Bill Frist managed to get the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act attached to a must-pass but totally unrelated Safe Ports Act in last minute political manouevering at the end of September. The tactic worked - the primary bill was passed with the attachment riding through on its skirts.

This practice of attaching stalled bills to more important laws in order to ram both through is apparently not unusual in Congress. In fact the U.S. Senate Web site offers an official definition of the practice: a "Christmas tree bill," meaning unrelated amendments that adorn legislation.

The political editor for C-NET News, Declan McCullagh provided readers with interesting insight into this sort of Washington chicanery this week, drawing attention to the fact that: "President Bush just signed into law a bill slapping more restrictions on online gambling. The odd thing, though, is that at his press conference on Friday, Bush mentioned neither gambling nor the Internet."

That's because the restrictions were buried in Section 801 of a massive port security bill, which had nothing to do with the Internet and became one of those must-pass-before-November-7th political gambits of which Congress becomes so enamored in election years.

McCullagh writes that if this happened only rarely, perhaps American voters could forgive their elected representatives for gluing unrelated amendments onto a proposal that's destined to become law, asking the rhetorical question, "With a tight election just weeks away, how many politicians have the mettle to vote against "port security?"

However, the technique has become commonplace, says McCullagh, meaning that debate in the U.S. Congress is often bypassed. Voters also lose a chance to learn how their political representatives vote on specific topics, rather than on a 300-page bill with scores of unrelated components.

"Which, of course, is precisely the point," opines McCullagh. "Because politicians dislike being held accountable for their actions - specific votes can be compiled into embarrassing scorecards and inconvenient voting records - they prefer to lump everything together."

McCullagh goes on to give some shocking examples of how the practice is (mis)used:

• The Real ID Act, which creates a national ID card starting in 2008, was glommed onto an $82 billion "emergency" military spending bill (HR1268) last year. Unless Americans are outfitted with these federalized ID cards, they won't be able to do things like board airplanes or enter national parks and some government buildings.

Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Texas Republican, warned at the time that the Real ID Act "offers us a false sense of greater security at the cost of taking a gigantic step toward making America a police state." But the spending bill sailed through the Senate unanimously and met with only a few dissenting votes in the House.

• Slapping a $15 tax on .com, .net and .org domain names in 1998 was part of an "emergency supplemental appropriations" bill (HR3579) to fund the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. The cash went to politically-savvy Network Solutions, now part of VeriSign.

• Enacting a controversial proposal to punish Web masters with six months in prison if they publicly post anything that's "harmful to minors." Instead of holding an honest, up-or-down vote on the Child Online Protection Act, politicians slipped it into an "omnibus" bill (HR4328) to fund the bulk of the federal government, including the Treasury Department. COPA is being challenged in court by the American Civil Liberties Union.

• Coercing libraries and schools into filtering Internet connections was done through the simple expedient of attaching it to an unrelated spending bill (HR4577) to fund the Treasury Department, Labor Department and Congress itself. A divided Supreme Court upheld the restrictions as constitutional.

McCullagh says there are many other examples, pointing out that the practice of hanging unpopular amendments on a Christmas tree bill isn't even limited to spending measures: A few weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Recording Industry Association of America tried to insert its own copyright-hacking-authorization language into what eventually became the Patriot Act.

"The worrisome thing is that, even though politicians have left Washington to campaign, they've only enacted two of the 12 spending bills necessary to fund the federal government for the 2007 fiscal year, McCullagh concludes. "So we should expect plenty of mischief when they return after the election: Think of it as an early Christmas present that Congress gives itself every year."