The Maryland state legislature has failed to pass legislation dealing with daily fantasy sports before it adjourned on Monday night.
After the House failed to act, Mike Miller, the president of the state Senate, called on the state’s attorney general to take legal action against the fantasy sports industry.
After two bills passed in the Senate last month, the full House did not take an up-or-down vote on the two pieces of legislation.
S 976 and S980 bills were on the House’s docket. One would have sent the question of whether the state should regulate daily fantasy sports to a referendum and the other would amount to a ban on daily fantasy sports if voters did not approve the referendum.
Both bills had been scheduled to be considered in a hearing last week, however, neither was voted on. The referendum bill passed by a 22-0 margin on Monday, however, since it never came up for a full vote in the House, it meant very little.
The industry had been actively campaigning against both bills and it views this as a victory.
The daily fantasy sports industry believed the state was one of the few remaining ones where it had established legal clarity, with a 2012 law.
The idea was turned on its head after Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh issued an advisory opinion on the subject of daily fantasy sports in January. Frosh’s office wrote in that the law “should have been subject to voter referendum because it is an expansion of commercial gaming in Maryland.”
The legislative effort was an attempt to follow Frosh’s opinion, but for now that will not happen.
Senate President Mike Miller, who sponsored the bill that would have banned daily fantasy sports, believed the issue is not simply dead in the water. Miller said that Frosh, who was visiting the chamber, should file a lawsuit to ban the games from operating in the state. Miller said: “I know he’s capable of handling it.”
