FanHouse HenryWaxman

Henry Waxman has gone about as far as he can go in ensuring that professional baseball players aren't using steroids. A bevy of high-profile Congressional hearings -- including the brilliant Roger Clemens castration -- should, right or wrong, be enough for any league or player to think twice about defrauding their sport. The fear of Waxman is palpable and prohibitive. Just look at that man. His moustache is pure terror.

Still, with all that in his pocket, Waxman won't let the steroid issue die. He's unhappy about "misinformation" he believes Bud Selig and Donald Fehr provided regarding the lowered number of positive steroids tests in 2004. Don't mess with The Waxman:

"It's clear that some of the information Major League Baseball and the players union gave the committee in 2005 was inaccurate," Waxman said in a written statement. "It isn't clear whether this was intentional or just reflects confusion over the testing program for 2003 and 2004. In any case, the misinformation is unacceptable."

The discrepancy is over a potential flaw in the 2004 testing which might not have properly tested players with 2003 positives. More than that, those players possibly found out about their tests ahead of time. That flaw seems like a pretty minor detail -- so a few more positive tests happened in 2004; this isn't much of a secret, nor should it be -- but if true, it speaks to Selig and Fehr's desire to wipe the whole steroids mess under the table, even as they pledged to solve it. Which is just so unlike them.

The Clemens hearing is over now, and the assorted parties have retreated. The Clemens Hearing Report Card will assess the key players' performances in a way that has about as much to do with baseball as the hearing itself. Up next: Henry Waxman!

As the chairman of the prestigious House oversight committee, the name Henry Waxman comes with built-in cred. It's not easy to get appointed to these committees, you know -- that requires years of finagling favors for even one's worst political enemies, all for the chance to one day be chair, and one day fail as spectacularly as Henry Waxman did today.

It's not that Waxman's conduct was especially egregious; a few of his colleagues more than cornered that market. It's just that Waxman did so little to rein the committee members in -- so little to prove that today's hearing really was about steroids awareness -- that by the end of the fracas it was clear why Waxman called the hearing in the first place: to publicly hang Roger Clemens. Clemens probably deserves that fate, but American public doesn't.

Still, kudos to Waxman for sticking up for Brian McNamee. And, as an editor noticed this morning, for looking like Ronald Weasley's pet rat Scabbers. Redeeming qualities are redeeming qualities.

Henry Waxman: D+

More Clemens Coverage:
Roger Clemens Hearing Live Blog Part 1 | Part 2
The More Talk About Andy Pettitte, the Worse It Gets for Roger Clemens
Clemens, McNamee Each Have Their Fans in Congressional Hearings

Check out our Clemens hearing live blog right here.

Sigh. This is true: Congressman Lacy Clay just took it upon himself to ask Roger Clemens which uniform he would wear into the Hall of Fame. The Rocket refused to answer, and there was much chortling.

We already know that some House Oversight Committee members are scurrilous baseball fans; getting an autograph with taking photos with Roger Clemens sealed that deal. But who knew that the members of the committee would come into today's hearing with such hard and fast opinions of both McNamee and Clemens?

It seems few of the committee members don't have their minds made up. Either Clemens is lying, or McNamee is lying, depending on who you are. For example, Rep. Tom Davis has defended Roger Clemens' throughout the day, mounting a B12-infused defense about the famed abscess on Clemens' butt. When Committee chair Henry Waxman attempted to lay out the two sides of the debate, it was hard to tell who yelled "B12!" faster: Clemens, or Davis. Davis even went so far as to call a medical question addressed to Clemens as a "new definition of lynching." (Whether it was a "high-tech lynching" was left to the citizen to decide.) The best pro-Clemens show of the day thus far has come from Indiana's Dan Burton, who was practically screaming at Brian McNamee, calling him a liar, and claiming the trial-by-media circus surrounding today's events is a product of an overzealous media. Both Davis and Burton are Republicans.

You can find Part 2 of the Live Blog here.

12:58 - And with that they take a break. I'm out of here to cleanse myself after watching our Congress at work for the last three hours. Stick around the FanHouse though because we'll keep covering absolutely everything that comes up.

12:54 - Rep. Norton (D-DC) with the line of the day, dripping with sarcasm after asking why Clemens would keep working with someone who injected his wife with HGH and assorted other things he did. "Mr. Clemens, I'm sure you're going to heaven." That's gold.

12:50 - Waxman is back on the mic, yo, and is asking questions about the boardshorted nanny of yore. After repeated requests to Clemens and his staff to speak to the nanny, the committee finally did on Monday. It was worth the wait.

The nanny was at the party, so was Debbie Clemens and they both stayed overnight at Canseco's house. She told the committee that Rocket was there as well.

Then, she told the committee that Clemens & Co. asked her to come over on Sunday after a long time without any communication with them. She said she told Clemens she didn't remember a party at Canseco's house and Clemens told her that she didn't remember it because he wasn't there.

Waxman challenged Clemens about why they would have her come to his house on Sunday before forwarding her name to the committee, which brings attorney Rusty Hardin out of his seat to yell at Waxman. As Waxman says, there's nothing more here than the appearance of impropriety but that's as damning as anything that's happened to Clemens to this point in time.

They've made his alleged presence at the BBQ a key part of this proceeding so the idea that he was trying to influence what she told the committee is very hurtful to Clemens.

We've already talked about Donald Fehr's dilemma -- he's both responsible for protecting the players' interests yet expected to help rid the game of PEDs. But when meeting with Congress yesterday, he turned the tables and blamed the government for sharing some of the culpability. From the New York Daily News:

As the hearing on the Mitchell Report wound down, the MLBPA chief executive acknowledged that while juiced ballplayers had made steroids appealing to America's youth, Congress has played a role, too, thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994.

The law, better known as DSHEA, allows supplement manufacturers to sell their products without the expensive and lengthy safety testing required for prescription medicines and over-the-counter remedies.

As a result of the deregulation of the industry, supplements that promise to make people slimmer, stronger and sexier became staples on the shelves of thousands of pharmacies, gas stations and convenience stores - and many of those untested, little-regulated products are targeted at teen-age athletes and other kids.

As the article goes on to explain, some of the supplements that are able to escape the FDA's watchful eye either end up being discovered to be potentially harmful (such as ephedra and androstenedione) or actually tainted with other regulated substances. Rep. Henry Waxman, who led the proceedings yesterday, actually agreed with Fehr and called for the DSHEA bill be re-examined. It'll be interesting to see what actually comes of this, but either way it's a good example that baseball's PED problem is far more complex than just a bunch of greedy ballplayers.

Yesterday, Congress' House Oversight Committee made a very special, patriotic announcement: Roger Clemens, Brian McNamee, and others would be called to testify under oath about the use of steroids in baseball. Besides the obvious benefit of making Roger Clemens swear ("Swear?" "Swear.") under oath that he didn't enjoy the steady rush of Winstrol, it looks unlikely that this latest round of Congressional testimony will do anything to shine light on steroids in baseball. Did you know that steroids are bad? Yeah, me too. We don't need Henry Waxman to hammer the point home.

The whole thing is ruse, designed to raise the profile of a few select House members and gather people who don't know what a caucus is around C-Span for a day. It's a waste of time. Baseball Prospectus' Gary Huckabay eloquently agrees:

All this time, I thought there was a writer's strike. But surely, this has to be fiction, right? Pakistan is teetering on the brink of chaos. The economy's fragile at best, plagued by fear, uncertainty, and doubt, both on the business and consumer side. Oil's at $100 a barrel. We've got nearly 200,000 troops deployed and in harm's way around the world. The federal debt is to the point where it's about to grow by a digit - which would be its 14th.

So, facing these, and lots of other issues that face the citizenry, Henry Waxman and crew have decided to spend their time, their staff's time, and, unfortunately, our time, by grilling a bunch of ballplayers about whether or not they used substances to enhance their play on the field.

[...] This whole issue is bulls–t, and everyone, in their heart of hearts, knows it. The collective societal masturbation on this issue is something out of Ionesco, and the number of whorish sell-outs who should resign in disgrace is climbing faster and more brazenly than Barry Bonds' HR totals ever did.

Well said. Steroids are bad, kids, but regardless of how you feel about the issue it's impossible to justify wasting government dollars, and time, "investigating" the issue. Whatever the urges are that lead us to immolate baseball players publicly, our society should do better. Our elected officials owe us more.