Billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson has hired former GOP Senator and majority leader Trent Lott to lobby on behalf of the Restoration of the American Wire Act (RAWA).
Lott, who works on behalf of the Washington D.C. lobbying firm, Squire Patton Boggs will be pushing Adelson’s anti-online gambling legislation to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Of course Adelson didn’t hire Lott directly. The appointment of Squire Patton Boggs was done through the Adelson-funded group, Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling (CSIG).
No matter who he’s really working for, Lott will have his work cut out for him. RAWA has not been particularly well received on Capitol Hill where most lawmakers either don’t care about internet gambling, or consider it an extremely low priority.
Online gambling is, however, a huge concern to Adelson, who owns a string of very successful land-based casinos. He’s got no problem peeling off cash for what most in the know consider a lost cause.
Bearing that in mind, Lott might be the right man for the job. After all as he is no stranger to lost causes. According to a report on CalvinAyre.com, Lott spent a good deal of his college years at Ole Miss working to block efforts to racially integrate his fraternity.
As an adult, Lott distinguished himself in the US Senate by openly longing for the days of the Jim Crow South.
In 2002 he became one of the first public figures to be publicly shamed by a blog when TalkingPointsMemo.com exposed comments he made in praise of arch segregationist Strom Thurmond. Lott’s home state of Mississippi Strom’s failed bid for presidency and suggested that, “…if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either.”
If passed, RAWA would roll back the Wire Act of 1965 which, despite coming into law nearly 30 thirty years before the Internet became commonplace, was used to ban internet gambling.