THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Sheldon Adelson has been using the $Billions from his casinos to buy as many members of Congress as he can. His aim is to eliminate online gambling so his casinos are the only game in town. Now he is making a push to see if he has bought enough influence.

A push by the casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson to outlaw online gambling has ignited a bitter civil war in the gambling industry, dividing one of Washington’s most powerful interest groups and posing a major test of the Republican megadonor’s political clout.

Mr. Adelson’s effort officially kicked off on Wednesday, when lawmakers, including a senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has accepted tens of thousands of dollars from the businessman and his family, introduced legislation originally drafted with Mr. Adelson’s lobbyist.

The bill would close a three-year-old loophole in federal law, banning online gambling — a growing industry that Mr. Adelson argues is bad for casinos and gamblers — and shutting down online gambling in a handful states that recently legalized it.

The dispute has already largely sidelined the industry’s powerful trade group, the American Gaming Association, after Mr. Aldelson threatened to withdraw from the organization if it continued to back expanded online gambling, according to several industry executives.

Mr. Adelson’s political prominence will be on display today in Las Vegas at the start of the four-day Republican Jewish Committee meeting — an event that has attracted several 2016 presidential prospects, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio.

Mr. Adelson, whose $38 billion fortune makes him among the richest men in the world, poured roughly $100 million into Republican campaigns in 2012, and he is known for pushing ideological fights in Washington. The battle over online gambling shows how he also lobbies for his business.

In this fight, dueling branches of the casino industry are now entering the fray, employing a half-dozen former elected officials and an a clutch of lobbyists and public relations strategists through a pair of strange-bedfellows coalitions.

A new group bankrolled by Mr. Adelson, the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling, is wooing socially conservative lawmakers opposed to gambling along with some Democrats who are worried about possible online gambling by minors. But it also features the former New York governor, George E. Pataki, who presided over a sweeping expansion of gambling in that state, including online bets on horse racing.

Rival casinos and online poker companies are counterattacking through the Coalition for Consumer and Online Protection. The group has signed up a former Republican congressman, Michael G. Oxley, who a decade ago led efforts to outlaw online betting and accused companies selling such games of “gobbling up victims in the United States,” and the former congresswoman Mary Bono. Mr. Oxley, who retired from Congress in 2007 and now works as a lobbyist, said in an interview that he believed state-regulated online gambling was now the best hope of countering the rapid expansion of illegal online gambling.

“The world has changed dramatically in the last 10 years,” Mr. Oxley said. “I have come to the conclusion you can’t try to control the Internet and the like.”

So that ugly slug Adelson has bought Miss Lindsey and is auditioning (making offers for) others this weekend. Both sides include some strange bedfellows so we will have to wait and see whose money has the sweetest voice.