Doesn't Congress have better things to do than talk Baseball?

While the two committees of congress, The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform”, and “The House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection” prepare to take up the mantle of removing performance enhancing drugs from Major League Baseball after the first of the year, a couple of questions had occurred to me.

First: Isn’t there more pressing things for our congressmen to be focusing on instead of determining if multi-million dollar super stars are poking themselves with needles to get even larger multi-million dollar salaries from the MLB owners? I mean, shouldn't the force and political clout of the US congress be focused on things like, a wide spread drug problem plaguing the entire country? Or maybe they should put their weight behind figuring out how to help the millions of homeowners losing their homes because they can’t afford loans given to them simply because some mortgage broker decided he needed another patsy to help pay for that Mercedes he just bought, and didn’t care whether he/she was placing a family at risk of having to file bankruptcy and lose their belongings. Or maybe they should put their focus on how to extricate our troops overseas from a situation that looks for all intents and purposes to be a never ending police force action to keep radical extremists from whacking each other by blowing themselves up.

Secondly: While the attempt to get to the bottom of the PEDs issue in Major League Baseball is admirable (it does provide headlines), better questions that congress can actually do something about might be to look at how Dentists and Aging clinic Doctors are able to blithely prescribe HGH or Steroids to any Tom, Dick, or Harry personal trainer for no apparent medical purpose. The record books of Major League Baseball are almost for ever tarnished due to the widespread use of PEDs, but maybe our elected representatives should be focusing on how to halt the apparently easy acquisition and distribution of such things instead of talking to Selig and Fehr, who couldn’t agree as to whether the sun rose in the east or west, if they were held at gunpoint.

The Mitchell report pretty much laid out the problems of PEDs in baseball over the last 20 years or so, and provided some pretty specific recommendations on what needed to be done to reduce the use of those drugs in baseball going forward.

Our elected representatives have much more pressing and broader impacting items they should be focusing on, instead of making themselves some headlines by shaking their indignant fingers at a bunch of over paid, and pampered multi-millionaires.