Bill Miller says states must maintain pressure on gaming regulators

Bill Miller told G2E the only way the states lose is if they take their foot off the throat.

That is not a legal argument. It is a closing argument, which means Miller already knows the merits are settled enough to talk about willpower instead. The question worth pricing now is not whether prediction markets are legal — four circuit courts are working on that — but whether the regulatory architecture being built around them is designed to win in court or to outlast the fight regardless of what courts say.

The CFTC's move this week answers that. The Commission sent two separate rulemaking proposals to the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs: one that would pull event contracts into the definition of a swap, and a companion proposal on whether gaming-style products can be excluded from swap treatment. Read together, they are a two-sided squeeze. Expand the definition to capture prediction markets on one end; explicitly carve out casino-style contracts on the other. The Commission does not need both proposals to succeed. It needs one to land, and the other gives the White House a menu.

This matters because the CFTC just lost twice in the circuit courts. After those defeats, you might expect the agency to go quiet while appeals proceed. Instead it went to rulemaking — which means it is building a second front. If the courts eventually rule that existing CFTC authority does not reach sports event contracts, the Commission wants a rule on the books that changes what "existing authority" means. That is not an agency conceding ground. That is an agency playing a longer game than the operators are.

I have watched regulatory plays like this before — an agency losing the judicial argument while quietly rewriting the statutory frame underneath it. The operators tend to celebrate the court wins while the rule advances on a separate docket. By the time the rule reaches its own legal challenge, the litigation posture has shifted.

The AGA's $1 billion tax-gap figure, repeated again at G2E alongside the Indian Gaming Association, is part of the same architecture. That number is a lobbying instrument, and it works: it gives state legislators a loss they can point to, which is more politically durable than a constitutional argument most of them cannot explain to a constituent. James Siva's line that the tribes are California's only licensed operator is the same move — it plants a flag that prediction markets are not filling a regulatory vacuum, they are competing inside one.

The Sixth Circuit's Tennessee ruling reversed a lower court that had credited Kalshi's swap argument. The timetable for what comes next in that proceeding is not on the public record. But the direction is: states are winning at the appellate level, and the CFTC is building rules that would make future wins structurally redundant. Kalshi would need to beat both the courts and the rulemaking clock, in sequence, on separate tracks.

Miller is not wrong that this is headed to the Supreme Court. He is probably also right that the states have momentum. What he did not say — and what the CFTC's dual filing makes clear — is that the federal regulator is now pulling in the same direction as the states, which is a different fight than the one prediction markets thought they were in twelve months ago.