Urine For it Now!

Matt Welch | April 1, 2005

Members of the House Committee on Government Reform -- which will from here on out be described as the House Committee on "Government Reform" -- had so much fun sniffing Mark McGwire's jock that they're coming back for seconds and thirds, demanding to see all drug-test data from the National Football League, "the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, Major League Soccer, the National Collegiate Athletic Association and USA Track & Field." According to the San Francisco Chronicle,

The panel is exploring the prospect of forcing all sports, amateur and professional, to adhere to one strict policy regarding performance-enhancing drugs.

Comments

|4.1.05 @ 1:24PM|#

Uncle Sam - a.k.a., good ol' Sniffin' Underpants.

|4.1.05 @ 1:27PM|#

We're doomed...

|4.1.05 @ 1:37PM|#

Major League Soccer players can barely afford Meisterbrau, let alone steroids.

|4.1.05 @ 1:39PM|#

What, no love for lacrosse?!

James Anderson Merritt|4.1.05 @ 1:44PM|#

I thought the investigation of baseball was predicated on the antitrust exemption that baseball enjoys. Are those other sports also exempt? If not, by what authority does congress presume to tell those professional sports how to run their businesses?

Is this similar to the drug war situation? Alcohol prohibition required a constitutional amendment, but after that amendment was repealed, zealots in the government manufactured bogus "authority" to prosecute an even more invasive, pervasive, and persistent drug war. Baseball's steroid hearings required the fig leaf of the antitrust exemption, but have the zealots now manufactured a bogus "authority" to lean on professional sports of all kinds, whether exempt from antitrust or not?

With regard to federal intervention into areas of life that are none of its damned business, the point of silliness was reached long ago and now recedes in the distance, as we zoom toward the cliff, as if we were steroid-enhanced lemmings. Enough already! What will it take to get the lead lemmings in Congress to stop this crap NOW?

|4.1.05 @ 1:46PM|#

Actually, I didn't even understand why Congress bothered with the antitrust argument in the first place. The commerce clause would appear to give such power on its face, given that professional sports teams routinely cross state lines as part of their business.

|4.1.05 @ 1:51PM|#

Success: We just crafted a bill that will allow the Feds to and drug test everyone, for everything, all the time. And the committe has a agreed to hear out version of the bill! How lucky is that?

Kid Handsome|4.1.05 @ 1:54PM|#

Maybe it's just me, but I sort of had the idea that a House Committee on Government Reform should . . . I don't know . . . focus on reforming the government. Unless we're now beholden to the MLS and nobody told me.

James B.|4.1.05 @ 1:56PM|#

SR-

Baseball is not commerce. In the case Federal Baseball Club vs. National and American League (1922) Oilver Wendell Holmes wrote that team's "business is giving exhibitions of baseball, which are purely state affairs."

|4.1.05 @ 1:59PM|#

SR-The ICC gives the power to regulate trade disputes among the states. It does not give unlimted authority over any business that crosses state lines.

|4.1.05 @ 2:00PM|#

SR said:
Actually, I didn't even understand why Congress bothered with the antitrust argument in the first place. The commerce clause would appear to give such power on its face, given that professional sports teams routinely cross state lines as part of their business.


But even the commerce clause shouldn't be used to poke into this matter. The only place that the commerce clause should (I repeat, should; I realize the real world operates differently) come into play would be to make sure that states and municipalities don't make some sort of rule that penalize a team from another state, such as a Jim Crow law that would prevent the road team's black player from even taking the field. As such, Congress's commerce clause should act only on states and municipalities, not on the businesses that cross state lines.

|4.1.05 @ 2:11PM|#

And in this surprise development:

"Mugabe Party Wins Zimbabe Poll"

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=632845

Warren|4.1.05 @ 2:12PM|#

I for one don't see why pro athletes should be tested just like congressmen... oh wait.

|4.1.05 @ 2:14PM|#

I tell ya. When the Republicans get in office you won't see this kind of out of control abuse of federal power....... oh....wait....ummmmm....urrr....never mind..

|4.1.05 @ 2:34PM|#

I didn't say I *agreed* with the use of the commerce clause for such purposes. However, given that the Supreme Court in 1913 (i.e., almost 30 years before the aggregation principle was articulated in Wickard v. Filburn) concluded that Congress had the power to regulate prostitution if people crossed state lines for that purpose, it would hardly be likely that the Supreme Court today would conclude that Congress lacked the power to so regulate professional sports whose players cross state lines.

ASIDE TO NUMBER 6: The Supreme Court has interpreted the plain language of the commerce clause to allow regulation of businesses that cross state lines since the late 19th Century (see, e.g., railroads). I don't particularly like it, but it's hardly a radical reading of the document.

|4.1.05 @ 4:42PM|#

Hopefully this will be a death knell for professional sports. Organized sports were developed and supported by business in the late nineteenth century to give workers something to do besides get wasted on their off hours.

If sports go downhill because no one feels they can relate to the drug taking players anymore, perhaps more people will start drinking and drugging, which in turn might lead to an end of the War on Substances?

|4.1.05 @ 5:58PM|#

State legislation of sports is fun for everyone!

Arrrrggggh

Franklin Harris|4.1.05 @ 7:29PM|#

Major League Soccer players can barely afford Meisterbrau, let alone steroids.

Steroids could only improve the game.

|4.1.05 @ 7:36PM|#

"The panel is exploring the prospect of forcing all sports, amateur and professional, to adhere to one strict policy regarding performance-enhancing drugs."

Why? Why shouldn't the individual leagues athletic associations and whatnot develop their own policies on these issues and see what works and what does not? Why shouldn't the people who are most directly affected by these drugs: the management and the players decide for themselves what their policy for their organization should be? Why is it considered better to have the Congress impose a single policy from on high?

|4.1.05 @ 8:27PM|#

So much for America seeing another Olympic Medal...

b-psycho|4.1.05 @ 10:54PM|#

How'z aboot applying a strict policy on performance-stifling drugs to congressmen? Namely, one requiring their use until they're too stoned to care so much about anyone else's drugs.

James Anderson Merritt|4.2.05 @ 10:50AM|#

Stoner Nixon says, "Hopefully this will be a death knell for professional sports. Organized sports were developed and supported by business in the late nineteenth century to give workers something to do besides get wasted on their off hours."

Hmmm ... anyone for Rollerball?

|4.4.05 @ 1:40PM|#

"the National Basketball Association, the National Hockey League, Major League Soccer..."


Leave it to the Feds to not know that there IS NO NHL!!