Congress Holds Baseball Steroid Hearings

As usual, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform met in the Rayburn Office Building earlier this week to conduct its business. Testifying before it this time weren’t experts in public policy but rather washed up major league baseball players. The issue before it wasn’t how to find the billions of missing dollars in Iraq-Nam’s reconstruction efforts but whether a trainer gave a pitcher a shot of steroids or human growth hormone in the buttocks. What a farce.

First and foremost, Congress has better things to do. It is an indictment of the entire American political system that anyone could think for two seconds that an investigation into how athletes cheat or don’t cheat is even appropriate for Congressional action. Complicit in this charade are the media. If there is a single reporter who has condemned this unconscionable waste of taxpayers’ money and legislators’ time, that name remains unknown here.

Secondly, the use of these compounds and other “performance enhancing” drugs may or may not be contrary to the laws of the US and Canada (Roger Clemens may or may not got his read-end-ful in Toronto) depending on whether a prescription was involved (and in Canada, possession alone without a prescription does not appear to be a crime). If they aren’t illegal, there’s nothing to investigate. And if their use is illegal, are there no police, nor district attorneys, no FBI or Mounties to handle things. Congress is ill-equipped to investigate crimes.

Third, the people involved in this particular hearing (Mr. Clemens and Brian McNamee, the alleged shooter of bottoms) are has-beens who no longer matter in the 2008 Major League Baseball Season. If Congress had nothing better to do, and if a wide swath of MLB players were doping as they report for spring training right now, this hearing still had the wrong guys testifying.

This debacle only happened because in an election year some members of Congress wanted some free face-time on ESPN because that’s where the voters are right now. It also may serve some agendas to avoid looking into serious matters like Halliburton’s possible war-profiteering, the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo and elsewhere, and the twin bombs of the federal budget deficit and the trade deficit. Instead, the committee saw fit to spend its time trying to decide just what was in the syringe with which Mr. McNamee may or may not have injected Mr. Clemens. Everyone in that room should have been ashamed for being there.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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