Congress on steroids

Congress can't get its own essential work done - it's still wrestling with budget issues that were supposed to be resolved Oct. 1 - yet it wants to tell professional sports leagues how to manage their problems.

Sorry, but that's the wrong thing to do on two counts. First, common sense: If lawmakers can't do their own job right, they shouldn't be telling other people how to do theirs. Second, and more important: Congress has no business, moral or legal, to meddle in organized sports.

Ominously, a bill that mandates a uniform steroid policy for the four major sports leagues - Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League - had been gaining some traction recently.

What in the world are our elected leaders thinking? They think someone has elected them commissioners of these various sports?

Any such bill is an unwarranted intervention into the private sector by a clumsy and overweening government.

Frighteningly, this monstrosity's chief sponsors are two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Jim Bunning of Kentucky. What has become of the quaint notion that Republicans are for smaller government?

We're as much in favor of tough sanctions against athletes' use of performance-enhancing drugs as McCain and Bunning are. We even think the "three strikes and you're out" penalties their bill proposes are about right: a half-season ban for the first steroid violation; a full-season ban for the second and a lifetime ban for the third.

But that's beside the point. It's the sports leagues that should be making those decisions, not Congress. And if the leagues don't act - or if their actions are insufficiently tough - then let the public, fans and sports fraternity demand the necessary reforms.

In other words, the free market.

With the emphasis on free.

When professional sports become more of a competition between drug makers instead of the talent and skills of athletes, the bottom line will drop out of league sports, and pressure will build to make the games honest again. Moreover, athletes are starting to back off steroids on their own, as they become more aware of how the drugs can damage their long-term health.

Hopefully, Major League Baseball's proposed new crackdown - a 50-game suspension for the first offense, 100 games for the second and a lifetime ban for the third - will get Congress to back off.

Sadly, a modest respect for the limited role of government in a free society ought to have been more than sufficient to do that.

If the 535 members of Congress will be second-guessing professional sports' punishments for steroids, why not meddle further? We've always felt it was inequitable for the NFL to penalize an offensive team 10 yards for holding, but only mark off five yards against a defense for the same breach of the peace.

How about it, Congress? Can you save us from this calamity as well?