Once again, Congress is trying to stick it’s nose where it doesn’t belong:
A ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has sent a letter to Alex Rodriguez asking him to meet with committee staff members to talk about the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.
Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, said he sent the letter to Rodriguez this week. The Congressman, in an interview with William C. Rhoden, a sports columnist for The New York Times, said he wanted to question Rodriguez about whether he received advance notice on a drug test from the union’s chief operating officer, Gene Orza, at the end of the 2004 season.
He also said he wanted to talk to Rodriguez about how his positive 2003 drug test, which was supposed to remain anonymous, was disclosed; and about the culture of drug use in baseball in the early part of this decade. Rodriguez has said he used banned substances from 2001 to 2003.
(…)
“I want him to come forward and let us know exactly what the environment was then, what he knows about the allegations of being tipped off,” Cummings said. “If that is happening today, that destroys the integrity of the testing process, which was something we were most concerned about here in Congress.”
That concern, of course, is what brought us the insanity of last year’s Congressional Committee confrontation between Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee, which even the Committee Chairman later admitted was a bad idea.
I’ve been silent on the Alex Rodriguez story mostly because I’m disappointed in him, but I will say he seems to be taking the right road here in coming clean and admitting his steroid use. If he’s really smart, he’ll ignore this “request” from Congress.
