In July 2010, Sen. Blanche Lincoln named the Super Bowl, Kentucky Derby, and Masters on the Senate floor as examples of sports-event contracts with no legitimate commercial purpose, arguing the CFTC should have authority to prohibit them. By 2024, lobbying disclosures showed her firm had received $480,000 from Kalshi to advocate before those same regulators that contracts like those deserve federal protection.
Her original statements are now being cited as evidence of congressional intent in active federal court cases. A circuit split has emerged across multiple circuits, and the CFTC proposed a new event-contract framework on June 10, 2026.
From the Senate Floor to K Street
Lincoln helped establish the federal authority now at the center of the sports-contract dispute, and her firm is paid to reinterpret it.
As chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee and a principal architect of Dodd-Frank’s derivatives provisions, Lincoln helped give the CFTC authority to review gaming-related event contracts. She specifically named major sporting events as examples of products Congress wanted regulators to be able to stop.
Dodd-Frank directed the CFTC to evaluate contracts involving gaming, terrorism, assassination, and war. The agency adopted Regulation 40.11 in 2011, which categorically prohibited designated contract markets from listing certain contracts in those categories.
Lincoln’s firm, Lincoln Policy Group, now represents Kalshi before that same agency. Lobbying disclosures show payments from Kalshi totaling $480,000 since 2024, covering work directed at both Congress and the CFTC on event-contract regulation.
Her firm’s stated position is that properly regulated prediction markets serve legitimate financial purposes and that CFTC oversight is preferable to offshore or unregulated alternatives. Her documented public positions shifted across a clear arc:
- 2010: Sports-event contracts have no legitimate commercial purpose; the CFTC should have authority to prohibit them.
- 2024: Restrictions on event contracts are unjustified; sports outcomes carry economic exposure for advertisers, apparel companies, and sponsors.
- 2025 (after Kalshi launched sports contracts in January): Broad sports outcomes warrant a permissive federal framework.
Her Own Words, Used Against Her Client
Courts keep returning to the congressional record Lincoln helped create.
A federal judge in New York reportedly cited Lincoln’s 2010 remarks when rejecting Kalshi’s challenge to New York gambling enforcement; the underlying court opinion requires independent verification and a confirmed docket citation before that claim can be treated as established. Legislative history of this kind is not statutory text, but courts may consider it as evidence of congressional intent when interpreting ambiguous statutes.
The circuit conflict is substantial. The Third Circuit ruled in April 2026 that federal law likely preempts New Jersey’s attempt to regulate Kalshi. The Ninth Circuit reached the opposite conclusion in a Nevada case, holding that state gaming regulation applied regardless of how the product was structured.
The Sixth Circuit also ruled against Kalshi in litigation involving Ohio and Tennessee. New Jersey subsequently asked the Supreme Court to resolve the conflict, and a coalition of 39 states and the District of Columbia urged the Court to take the case.
The state-level demands are concrete: licensing compliance, taxes, age restrictions, self-exclusion lists, and responsible-gambling rules. Those are the same consumer protections that apply when you place a legal sports bet at a licensed sportsbook in your state.
Kalshi argues its contracts are federally regulated derivatives and that the Commodity Exchange Act bars states from applying their gambling statutes. Legal scholar Ilya Beylin has reportedly characterized the current administration’s regulatory shift as a radical departure and questioned whether sports contracts fit the statutory definition of economically consequential swaps; that characterization requires a confirmed source before direct attribution.
The CFTC’s Proposed Framework
A proposed rule would move away from categorical prohibition toward a contract-by-contract public-interest review.
The CFTC’s June 10, 2026 proposal would shift Regulation 40.11 from its existing categorical approach to a structured, individualized review process. Prediction-market volume reportedly exceeded $25 billion in 2025, according to the agency’s proposal documents, though that figure requires confirmation against the specific page of the proposal before publication.
Under the proposed framework, contracts settled on final scores, point differentials, tournament advancement, and aggregate statistics using objective criteria could generally be permissible. Contracts tied to player injuries, officiating decisions, discrete in-game actions, physical altercations, or pre-collegiate sports are identified as presenting heightened public-interest concerns.
Lincoln’s 2010 floor statements carry no statutory force on their own. Courts have nonetheless cited them as evidence of what Congress intended, which means her current lobbying position may continue to be used against her client’s interests in the same litigation she is simultaneously seeking to influence through Congress and the CFTC.
