With his veto pen, Gov. Chris Christie all but ended the New Jersey sports betting efforts to institute sports betting at its casinos and race tracks. Christie’s office announced today that he nixed a bill (S2250) that would have allowed New Jersey to circumvent the 1992 federal law that bans sports betting in most states, after New Jersey’s challenges to the law in court failed.

In doing so, Christie called federal law “sacrosanct,” while the sponsor of the bill, state Sen. Raymond Lesniak, said Christie “stuck a dagger in the heart of Atlantic City and our ailing horse racing industry.”

The bill — which passed the state Senate and Assembly by wide bipartisan margins — would have allowed private companies to open up wagering operations in Atlantic City casinos and the state’s harness racing tracks.

Lesniak said the U.S. Justice Department wrote in its legal briefs that the federal law does not “obligate New Jersey to leave in place the state-law prohibitions against sports gambling that it had chosen to adopt prior” to the law’s adoption. So the measure would have repealed old state laws barring sports betting in New Jersey and allowed private companies to open up wagering operations that would not require state regulation.

You can read more about the possibility of sports betting in the Garden State at NJ.com