McCain Going After MLB

Not content with just limiting free speech in this country, John McCain is now on the rampage again. This time he wants Congress to step in and regulate drug testing in baseball, and sports in particular:

"It just seems to me they can't be trusted," McCain told ABC's "This Week."

"What do we need to do? It seems to me that we ought to seriously consider ... a law that says all professional sports have a minimum level of performance-enhancing drug testing," McCain said.

My opposition to the legislation of the "minimum standard" drug policy doesn't make me an opponent of drug testing. Let me frankly say that the lack of a clear, standard drug policy in Major League Baseball is abominable and more indicative of the dysfunctional relationship between the greedy owners and the even greedier players union.

However, why does Congress suddenly have a stake in how MLB conducts its business? What is stopping McCain and his ilk from legislating drug testing among investment bankers or lawyers? If the answer is merely political feasibility, then our Constitution is weakening before our eyes. From my days working in the banking industry I would say that drugs are more rampant there than in MLB. My opposition to McCain's attempts has to do with Congress's relationship to its people, not to how I feel about drug policy.

This is just another attempt at Congress to legislate against injustice. Here in the dawn of our new millennium we have seen Congress pass two of the worst pieces of legislation to "confront" injustice: Sarbanes-Oxley and McCain-Feingold. The good intentions of these bills belie the reality; the Federal Government is attempting to control political speech along with how a business conducts its own operations.

Demanding drug testing in Major League Baseball will hardly bring down our civilization, however, John McCain and many other members of Congress, regardless of party, seem awfully trigger happy when it comes to controlling the behavior of the citizens they are supposed to serve.

Also, aren't we still at war? Doesn't this discussion seem a bit untimely? In earlier, more noble times, our baseball players were trading their baseball uniforms for army fatigues to fight for their country. Now we are watching Congress grill a man that was most known for his attempts to catch a fly ball, only to have it hit him the head and bounce over the fence for a home run.