Perjury, Steroids, and Congress

The indictment of Roger Clemens, charged with committing perjury before the United States Congress, brings a few questions to my mind:

1.) Should we be prosecuting a retired athlete for lying about using performance enhancing substances?  There's a surprisingly large number who say "no", and they're not all rabid Roger Clemens fans.  One argument seems is the old "he's suffered enough", i.e. he's become a pariah in MLB circles and his once-certain election to the Baseball Hall of Fame now seems extremely unlikely. 

There are also those who dismiss the gravity of the offense about which he apparently lied, "it wasn't murder or treason or something".  And there are those - myself included - who ask what business Congress has investigating steroid use in professional sports.

We heard many of the same arguments during the impeachment trial of President Clinton, who had certainly committed perjury himself.  "it's impractical" to remove the President of the United States from office over a lie he told in a deposition regarding a rather personal matter; but this was only a small part of the argument contra impeachment.  The most famous was that the offense "didn't rise to the level of impeachment", which I always found specious.

Is anyone reading this old enough to remember Alger Hiss?  For the younger set, Hiss was an official in the U.S. State Department who had been at Yalta with F.D.R. and was secretary of the founding meeting of the United Nations.  In 1948 an ex-Communist who was an editor at Time magazine, Whittaker Chambers, accused Hiss of being a Communist.  This was a cause celebre, especially since Hiss was an member of the "East Coast Establishment", an Ivy Leaguer who'd been a protege of one Supreme Court Justice while at Harvard (Felix Frankfurter) and susequently clerked for another (Oliver Wendell Holmes).  Hiss protested his innocence, and sued Chambers for libel.  The events which Chambers was able to prove were beyond the existing statutes of limitations, but Hiss was eventually charged with perjury, convicted, and jailed for several years.

Men (and women, lest they cavil at my insensitivity) lie, about matters large and small, for reasons good and bad.  But we need to be able to have confidence in our judicial proceedings and so the crime of perjury must be prosecuted and its perpetrators punished.  And prosecutions for perjury ought not be so rare that they are reserved as a "safety net" for instances when the law provides otherwise-insuficient remedy for the deeds of a miscreant.

2.) Why is Congress investigating steroid use in Major League Baseball in the first place?  On balance I suppose it might be a good thing, insofar as it keeps them from further curtailing our liberties, raising our taxes, or voting on any more legislation they haven't read!  But really, how's this their business?  Interstate commerce?  "Equal protection"? Baseball's informal status as our "national pastime"?  Or the "Imperial Congress" doing what it darn pleases?  Not that any of that is germane to the plight of Clemens, for one thing he wasn't subpoenaed or anything, he volunteered to testify! 

3.) There is much to be said about the effect of steroids (and H.G.H. and other stuff) on the game, far too much for this already-too-long post.  But please indulge me in a modest proposal: how about a separate league for players who want to use performance-enhancing drugs?  If, as the argument goes, a certain number of guys are going to do this no matter what, why not give them a venue to compete on an equal basis with their chemically-enhanced peers?  Middle infielders routinely hitting tape-measure homers, "real" power hitters routinely racking-up 75 home run seasons, relief pitchers throwing 100 m.p.h. for mutiple innings on back-to-back nights, and a 5-day disabled list in consideration for the "quicker recovery" that most players caught using P.E.D.s claim as their reason for using the juice?  If the "X-Games" and "Arena Football" were made for t.v., how much more the fully-juiced game of baseball?  Maybe then the rest of us fans could go back to watching the game as Wiliams and Koufax played it; or at least reasonably so.  (the mention of those names raises the question - how come these guys who are on the juice max-out at 100 pitches every fifth day, or need a break after a few straight games in the field?)