Muscleheaded.(PUBLIC POLICY III)(Government Reform Committee's regulation on juvenile substance abuse)

At times, it was hard to know who should have been more embarrassed by the House Government Reform Committee hearings on steroid abuse in baseball--the congressmen or the players. The hearings were the worst sort of congressional grandstanding. They came after the horse had left the barn and the barn door had been closed, since the steroid scandal had been building for years and now has finally been dealt with by baseball in the form of a stricter (if still imperfect) testing policy.

Committee chairman Tom Davis and his scold-in-arms Henry Waxman maintained that forcing the players to testify demonstrated to the nation's kids that they shouldn't use performance-enhancing drugs. But congressional hearings are not for educating "the children" outside of any possible legislative purpose.

That said, the hearings couldn't have happened to a nicer sport. Nearly everyone in baseball was perfectly happy to look the other way for a decade as impossibly muscled players turned in prodigious performances, and even formerly pedestrian outfielders mysteriously had 50-home-run seasons. If baseball ...