I hold in my hands the names of 57 card-carrying Communists! —Senator Joseph McCarthy.

[This is a work of poker fiction set ten thousand hands in the future. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.]

No Broadway show or Hollywood epic has ever been able to equal the real life drama played out during a live televised congressional hearing. From The Army-McCarthy Hearings (I hold in my hands the names of 57 card carrying Communists!) to the Watergate hearings (What did the President know and when did he know it?) to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas “He Said/She Said” hearings, there is simply no more compelling national spectacle.

It was just this sort of national spectacle that U.S. Senator Phil Fist (Republicrat-TN) was after when, before a huge television audience, he banged his gavel down to convene the Hold’em Hearings, “This meeting of the congressional Un-American Games Committee will come to order.”

The hearing room, filled to overflowing with Fist for President supporters, suddenly went quiet as Senator Fist paused dramatically for effect before holding up a file folder jam-packed with papers and cried into the microphone, “I hold in my hands the names of 57 playing-card-carrying pokeristas!

“Pokeristas” was not a real word with an actual definition. Phil Fist, in search of a catchy political slur, something like Feminazi or Homofascist, had come up with this derisive slang term for poker players, hoping to equate, in the public mind, something that sounded vaguely foreign and somehow subversive.

On cue the hearing room erupted into boos and hisses. Fist waited while TV cameras captured the moment and continued, “Coddled by their lackeys, the running dog Dummycrats and their stooges, the Reich wing Republithugs, these card-carrying pokeristas have infiltrated the US government and are, as we speak, subverting our way of life!

“Way back in 2006 Congress, acting in the name of the people, passed UIGEA, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, to prohibit online poker playing. Why then, all these years later, is online poker playing continuing as if there is no law against it at all? There can be only one answer—pokeristas! The very government officials charged with enforcing our anti-online poker laws have become the worst violators.

“I hold in my hand the names of 103 government officials who allow American poker players to slip through legal loopholes in order to flout the very anti-online poker laws they are sworn to uphold.

“Knowing something must be done to stop them, that some brave soul must step forward and just say ‘no!’ to the pokeristas, I, Senator Phil Fist, have humbly submitted for congressional approval the PEACE amendment.

“The Poker Elimination and Criminalization Enforcement amendment would immediately close all the legal loopholes created and exploited by the pokeristas that now allows Americans to illegally play in foreign online poker rooms. Untaxed and unregulated, these offshore card rooms operate outside our laws and against our national interests. The pokeristas, by blocking the passage of the PEACE amendment, are allowing our people to cross international borders for illegal purposes.

“I hold in my hand the names of 212 government officials who don’t want to give PEACE a chance.

“We will start our work by subpoenaing the worst of these pokeristas to appear before this Committee and compel them to testify about their card crimes. There’ll be no hiding behind legal technicalities like the Fifth Amendment this time. We the people are not going to let them go on playing their poker games!”

(To be continued in the next issue of Poker Player)