Assembly Bill 2863, introduced by Assemblyman Adam Gray, D-Merced, would make California the fourth state after New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware to legalize some Internet poker websites. The measure, which passed the Assembly Governmental Organization Committee on a 19-0 vote last week, says the sites can only be operated by Indian tribes that already have casinos in California.

The connection between the financial struggles of California horse-racing tracks and online poker is based on track owners’ arguments that they have been financially devastated by the rise of legal online horse betting and by the proliferation of Indian casinos in the Golden State since 2000. That’s when voters approved a state constitutional amendment making it much easier for tribes to get casinos approved. While the racing industry is declining in California, it still has some pull in the Legislature.

But there is a split in the media over how much of a breakthrough online poker advocates truly achieved last week. Coverage in the niche media that specialize in gambling was less likely to see the committee vote as a huge step toward online poker’s legalization than the mainstream media.

OnlinePoker.Report.com challenged the description of some of California’s wealthiest tribes as being “neutral” on AB2863 simply because they had not taken an unequivocal public stand on the measure. In particular, OPR reported, Agua Caliente and Pechanga representatives privately express broad skepticism about Gray’s bill. 

Some CA tribes want to block online juggernaut

Their biggest objection involves what in the online poker world is known as the “bad actor” debate: whether online poker sites with questionable histories should be firmly banned from partnering with casinos in setting up new state-specific online sites.

PokerStars is the site most consistently depicted as a villain, which led to clauses in a Nevada law meant to keep it out of state-approved online poker sites. Founded in 2001, the world’s largest online poker site was the biggest fish targeted in the U.S. government’s 2011 crackdown on online betting. The next year, it settled its legal fight with the Justice Department by paying $700 million without admitting wrongdoing.

Now PokerStars has quickly established itself as a juggernaut in New Jersey with its pokerstarsnj.com site. In 2014, it lined up partners in California: the Morongo Tribe and the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.

Unless other tribes get language in AB2863 that provides hard protections against a PokerStars-Morongo-San Manuel partnership, the legislation may end up being opposed by most of California’s richest tribes, whose generous campaign donations have given them considerable clout in Sacramento.

There is again a gap between mainstream and niche media coverage of this issue. Instead of being about keeping “bad actors” out of states, gambling news sites depict “bad actor” clauses as being about market protectionism.

One of the world’s best known law professors, Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe, agrees with that description and could work as a lobbyist for and counsel to PokerStars if a state law attempts to keep PokerStars from partnering with California tribes.

The California Court of Appeal, Second District, will take up the closely followed appeal in its Los Angeles courtroom.

The 2014 decision by Los Angeles Superior Court Rolf Treu made headlines across the nation. After the judge cited evidence showing the near-impossibility of firing incompetent teachers in California, he wrote, “All sides to this litigation agree that competent teachers are a critical, if not the most important, component of success of a child’s in-school educational experience. There is also no dispute that there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms” — with most working in largely minority schools.

The result, said Treu, was a de facto segregated system that reminded him of the circumstances in Kansas that led to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that led to the end of segregated schools. He wrote that evidence presented by the Vergara plaintiffs — nine students in predominantly minority schools in Los Angeles Unified — showed California had failed to provide “a student’s fundamental right to equality of the educational experience.”

Poor teaching a ‘deep-rooted inequity’

The ruling was depicted by the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers as an outrageous exaggeration of problems in state public schools and a de facto attack on teachers and unions. Nevertheless, the ruling prompted the New York Times to run an editorial lambasting California’s schools for neglecting Latino and African American students:

When states are sued for providing inferior education to poor and minority children, the issue is usually money — disproportionately more money for white students, less for others. A California judge has now brought another deep-rooted inequity to light: poor teaching.

In an important decision issued on Tuesday, Judge Rolf M. Treu of the Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that state laws governing the hiring, firing and job security of teachers violate the California Constitution and disproportionately saddle poor and minority children with ineffective teachers.

The ruling opens a new chapter in the equal education struggle. It also underscores a shameful problem that has cast a long shadow over the lives of children, not just in California but in the rest of the country as well.

Treu stayed his invalidation of the teacher-protection laws pending appeal.

The state government’s appeal of the ruling, filed by Attorney General Kamala Harris, questioned Treu’s assumptions about the effects of state law:

The notice of appeal cited several issues, including that “changes of this magnitude, as a matter of law and policy, require appellate review.”

 

The notice also faulted the trial judge, saying that he had “declined to provide a detailed statement of the factual and legal bases for [his] ruling.”

That’s from the Los Angeles Times.

High-profile law professors split on ruling

A powerhouse group of law professors, led by Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe, supported Treu’s decision in a friend of the court brief:

The California Constitution establishes public schools for the benefit of children, not teachers, and the State Education Clause talks about the right to public education as “essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people,” not as a right essential to the economic security of the teachers selected by the state to make that right a reality. Public schools exist to educate students, not to provide jobs, and job security, to teachers.

 

Another group of high-profile law professors, including Harvard’s Charles Ogletree and UC Irvine’s Erwin Chemerinsky, criticized Treu’s reasoning in their brief opposing the ruling:

Even if the record supported and the trial court found that the statutes caused the harms to the education of poor and minority students, that would not be sufficient to find the statutes invalid on their face and enjoin their enforcement. There also would need to be proof that striking down these statutes would remedy the harms and improve the education for these students. … There is no basis in the trial court’s decision, or in the voluminous record of an eight-week trial, for concluding that education of any identifiable group of students would be improved by the elimination of tenure, the prohibition on considering seniority in layoffs, or the injunction against enforcement of the procedural requirements for performance-based dismissal.

 

For more on the various friend of the court briefs — including one filed by former GOP Govs. Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger — go here for an EdSource overview.