The top policy-making senators on online poker are agreed: The chances that a federal online poker bill will pass before the end of 2012 are pretty much nil.

“Two weeks before Christmas, without being vulgar, what the hell would I put it on?” Sen. Harry Reid said this week, referring to his effort to find a bill to which he could attach a poker amendment.

For months, Reid has complained that Republicans have not come up with the votes necessary to advance legislation legalizing online poker through Congress.

But now, his top policy adviser has another bone to pick: with the industry.

“The AGA had met with a lot of people and claimed they’ve done a lot of other visits,” said David Krone, Reid’s chief of staff. “But unfortunately, I haven’t seen that turned into votes.”

The American Gaming Association does not represent every casino interest on the Las Vegas Strip, much less every gaming stakeholder in the country. But in Washington, it is the unofficial leader of a body of lobbyists who have spent the past four years pushing for an online poker bill.

In that time, the poker industry has been near-unanimous in its support for some form of federal intervention to legalize betting in Internet poker games and clarifying that poker is the only form of online gambling that is allowed.

But even lobbyists admit that the industry has not been speaking with a single, clarion voice about what that fix should look like — leaving room for doubt that those on the fence about online poker can wallow in.

“This is an industry of entrepreneurs. So saying we’re all going to think alike is not going to happen,” said Jan Jones, a lobbyist for Caesars Entertainment, likely the most active of the Nevada casinos angling for an Internet poker bill. “It’s big personalities, big thinkers. Harnessing this into one cohesive mind is a near impossibility.”

It has been especially hard over the past two years, as the casino industry has contended with a march of dramatic and jarring events. In the spring of 2011, online poker outfits Full Tilt, Absolute Poker and PokerStars were charged in federal court, sending lawmakers scrambling to divest themselves of any associations with those companies or their affiliates, and casting a pall over the issue of online poker in general.

Then, at the end of 2011, a new reading of the 1961 Wire Act from the Justice Department set states racing to approve their own, in-state online lotteries, significantly upping the pressure on the pro-poker lobby to push their issue through the federal process or miss their chance entirely.

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