Congress Looks at Sports

I finally did my taxes the other day. Week to week, you don't notice how much is actually going out the door - you just know what hits your bank account. Man when I tallied up the final numbers, it kind of made me sick to know that it took me an entire year to pay that much in taxes, only to have Arlen Specter spend it talking to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. What a wonderful time to be spending political capital and fiscal resources (otherwise known as money) - when everyone is putting pencil to paper, trying to figure out for how much the government is going to screw them for this year only to realize that our elected representatives are funding this sort of stuff.

Between Clemens/McNamee and this whole NFL probe, I'm thinking we as a nation are far too consumed with sports. It's really not okay for Congress to be spending time and resources working on this.

What does Senator Specter's Senate Judiciary Committee do? Here's what's on their docket for this week: JUDICIAL NOMINATIONS, FEDERAL COCAINE SENTENCING LAWS: REFORMING THE 100-TO-1 CRACK/POWDER DISPARITY, EXAMINING THE STATE SECRETS PRIVILEGE: PROTECTING NATIONAL SECURITY WHILE PRESERVING ACCOUNTABILITY.

It seems to me that State Secrets and Crack vs. Powder Cocaine issues are issues separated by orders of magnitude over whether the NFL handled a rules violation correctly. Yet, these are pushed aside so we can look at whether or not the NFL handled an internal investigation appropriately. I can assure you, that Commissioner Goodell's destruction of video tapes of football games is not comparable to the CIA destroying video tape evidence of prisoner abuse, as has been done by the good Senator from Pennsylvania.

How about the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform: Full Committee Hearing on Preservation of White House E-mails, Full Committee Hearing to Examine Mortgage CEO Severance Packages. What exactly is government reform as it regards steroids in baseball?

It would be an appropriate observation to note that congress is interested in steroid abuse and the league's response to it because of the public health implications of having role models engage in this behavior. However, that would be a focus that was not apparent in these hearings. That was not what the hearing was designed to discuss - what it was designed to discuss was who used what when. In practice, it turned out to be a partisan attack on Brian McNamee for having had the gall to implicate a "baseball titan" in performance enhancing drug use. Make no mistake, this was about Roger Clemens and baseball, this was not about public health implications. Henry Waxman essentially said as much after the fact when he stated he didn't even want to have held the hearing, but that Clemens was asking for it. What a remarkable thing: a "baseball titan" wants access and wants a hearing, and he's given it, pushing aside the real issues of the day.

Coupled with the quite apparent lack of preparation for the hearings, the attention is then appropriately drawn to whether or not these officials are intellectually capable of engaging in hearings on CEO Severance Packages and White House Email Preservation. The congress people seemed star struck and ill prepared to deal with the issue at hand. One could only hope that the lack of preparation was indicative of how important the majority of these folks believed the hearing to be, particularly given they knew how much attention this hearing would get.

How much influence do professional sports have in American culture? Professional leagues and athletes are often accused of being too self important, yet these investigations and hearings only serve to demonstrate our Congress is enamored by professional sports to the detriment of the real work of the legislature.