Trouble for riverboat gambling?

Sorry to sound apocalyptic, especially since we just dodged that Mayan Calendar bullet. However, a brand-new Supreme Court ruling is sure to get the attention of every company that owns a riverboat casino. By a 7-2 margin, the high court ruled that “anything that floats” does not constitute a vessel. In an opinion penned by Justice Stephen Breyer, houseboats have been deemed the province of housing authorities, not maritime ones. We’ve long had the farce of “boats in moats,” platforms surrounded by water, theoretically inoculating states like Mississippi and Missouri from that icky-poo gambling stuff. However, what would this latest ruling by the Supremes portend for floating — but permanently docked — riverboat casinos. Since they don’t meet the “used for transportation” standard set by Breyer and his colleagues, they suddenly find themselves reclassified as buildings. Will they have to resume nominal cruising? Perhaps not. Floating casinos may have actually caught a break from the Supremes, whose ruling would strongly suggest that they are no longer subject to Coast Guard oversight … so long as they stay moored. Maintaining the seaworthiness of riverboats can be a regulatory migraine headache for casino companies — in the case of Pinnacle Entertainment‘s former President Casino (above), it doomed the property to extinction. I don’t doubt that anti-gambling advocates are going to try and leverage today’s ruling against the industry … and somehow, somewhere, local authorities are pondering at this very moment how they might use it to squeeze additional tax dollars from those sinful (but oh so lucrative) gambling ships.