Gambling expansion is dead-on-arrival this session.
Still, the gambling lobby is pressing on anti-gambling Reps for the future. They’d have them believe the legislation has a chance, but they know it doesn’t.
In all likelihood it is an attempt to pressure Reps into waffling on gambling to weaken them for their next primary. After all, the gambling lobby needs a major makeover in the Legislature if it is to ever have hope of expanding gambling.
If turning pro-gambling isn’t dangerous in primaries, then why are Reps like Drew Darby, Charlie Geren, and Susan King being so careful to shape the way they say they are yes votes on gambling expansion? They’re on Team “Let Texans Decide”, but careful as they can be about how they frame their support for gambling expansion.
And that’s what this silly and defunct “Let Texans Decide” push has been all about – gambling expansion. The gambling lobby has not paid for the expensive statewide campaign just to get to know Texans better, whatever their position on gambling expansion is. Their messaging would suggest that all they want is to know what Texans think.
Texans have a little more common sense than to believe that.
Gambling expansion would enrich unscrupulous and politically-hyperactive gambling oligopolies, it would attract boatloads of new prostitution and drug use, as gambling always does, and it will cost us more money than it will bring in.
Texas would also come to look like a third world country from the highways, with the emergence of the terrible gambling advertising we see in neighboring states.
“Let Texans Decide” has been a high dollar, coordinated, and professional attempt to expand gambling in Texas, and it has failed.
The real “Let Texans Decide” happens every primary, when Texans consistently elect anti-gambling legislators. The gambling lobby knows this, and would like to set the “no” votes and weak “yes” votes up to lose primaries. We will never have a more liberal cycle in Texas, and still gambling expansion failed.
The gambling lobby would love to get yes votes into the House by loosening up the current Rep’s situation.