The big leagues of lying

Every player in Major League Baseball is a great athlete. Each one was the best athlete in college, high school, Little League, neighborhood parks, or wherever he played from the time he was old enough to walk.

Congress is exactly like Major League Baseball, for liars.

Not only are Members of Congress skilled liars, they have spent their entire careers staring down other liars and beating them in elections for offices all the way back to president of the junior high school student council.

Onto this playing field today walked Roger Clemens, a fierce competitor who is determined not to be beaten in the post-season battle for his reputation.

No helmet, no shin pads, no protective cup.

Even if he's telling the truth about everything, Roger Clemens could end up in jail for perjury. His sworn testimony conflicts with the sworn testimony of Brian McNamee and Andy Pettitte, and this is now a runaway freight train that no one can control. House Oversight Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and ranking member Tom Davis said they don't know if they'll make a referral to the Justice Department for a criminal investigation into perjury, but the Justice Department doesn't need a referral to pursue those charges.

What a travesty.

We have reached this sorry point because Congress chose to exceed the constitutional limits of its power by enacting national bans on some drugs and limits on the distribution of others. You may be surprised to hear this, but the U.S. Constitution doesn't give the federal government the authority to regulate drug use. That's why Prohibition required a constitutional amendment. [See "Marijuana, Prohibition and the Tenth Amendment."]

But drugs are bad and dangerous and parents across the country will vote for politicians who promise to protect their children, and so we have the Controlled Substances Act and a federal government that sends agents to California to bust up rings of cancer patients in possession of medical marijuana.

Still, the constitutional ground for a federal ban on steroid use in sports is very, very shaky.

That's why Congress has harangued Major League Baseball for years to take action on its own to stop steroid use. Any law they passed to compel drug testing would be very unlikely to survive a test in the courts. [See "Barry Bonds' big asterisk."]

Major League Baseball could have told Congress to take a flying leap off the Capitol dome. Instead, the commissioner and the head of the players' union dutifully showed up for public abuse at congressional hearings.

Why?

Because Congress threatened legislation to revoke baseball's anti-trust exemption. [Read our earlier post, "Tackling the NFL," to find out why team owners didn't want to risk that.]

Faced with a future of unknown congressional vengeance in legal and tax matters, Major League Baseball placated Congress by appointing a commission headed by George Mitchell, a former senator widely respected on Capitol Hill (see above), to make a good show of self-investigation.

Although Senator Mitchell's report urged everyone to look away from the past and toward the future, the Mitchell Report named some names, and some people objected to having their names destroyed just to give baseball's self-investigation a patina of credibility.

Roger Clemens is one of those people.

Clemens' lawyers, Rusty Hardin and Lanny Breuer, said today they advised him that coming out publicly to deny the allegations in the Mitchell Report would set in motion a chain of events that one day could land him in jail for lying to Congress.

Roger Clemens came out publicly to deny the allegations in the Mitchell Report.

Everyone looked a little bit ill in that hearing today. Lawmakers who have to face the voters every two years don't really want their names and faces in news reports about the greatest pitcher in baseball being investigated, indicted, tried and jailed for lying to Congress.

But the ship has sailed.

After the hearing, Congressmen Henry Waxman and Tom Davis tried hard not to look like bullies. "The only reason we had this hearing," they told reporters, "is that Roger Clemens insisted upon it."

Clemens' lawyers said that was a flat lie.

Wow, it sure sounded true when they said it.

Those guys are the best in the game.


Copyright 2008

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