Article I, Section 12 of the United States Constitution authorizes Congress to investigate and prosecute professional sports figures for use of performance-enhancing drugs.
In fact, it was James Madison who “felt no small anxiety for the elixirs & etc. employed by certain Cricketers for inequitable advantage on the Field as now widely reported in our Newspapers,” giving sound basis for what constitutional scholars call the Level Playing-Field Clause.
What? Did I hear you say that your dog-eared pocket Constitution omits Article I, Section 12? That can’t be. How else do we explain the right of the Federal Government to spend tens of millions of dollars prosecuting that threat to the Republic, former Red Sox pitcher Roger Clemens, for alleged steroid use?
By now you’ve perceived that the opening paragraph is not true. I also hope that regardless of your political stripe, you regard the prosecution of Roger Clemens for what it is: an unconstitutional and downright frightening exercise of police power which the Framers never intended for the national government.
That Clemens was acquitted is entirely irrelevant. Even fascism can be fair now and then.
In vetoing a public works bill in 1817, then President Madison wrote:
“But seeing that such a power is not expressly given by the Constitution, and believing that it can not be deduced from any part of it without an inadmissible latitude of construction and reliance on insufficient precedents; believing also that the permanent success of the Constitution depends on a definite partition of powers between the General and the State Governments, and that no adequate landmarks would be left by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the bill, I have no option but to withhold my signature from it, and to cherishing the hope that its beneficial objects may be attained by a resort for the necessary powers to the same wisdom and virtue in the nation which established the Constitution in its actual form and providently marked out in the instrument itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest.”
Defending our Constitution requires educating our fellow citizens as to its limits. Today’s teachable moment: an illegal Congressional witch-hunt ending with a $3 million, 9 week trial of a 7-time Cy Young Award winner who was accused of steroid use by a known liar.
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