It is pure hubris for Major League Baseball to believe that they could get away with giving Jose Canseco the silent treatment. In an age where athletes are sheltered like home-school students, everyone “invited” to testify at the March 17 hearing of the House Government Reform Committee is now compelled to testify by subpoena issued.
In an effort to keep the hubris train rolling strong, Major League Baseball plans to fight the congressional subpoenas. The pointman on this exercise in futility is Stanley Brand, the commissioner's lawyer. He believes that Congress is violating baseball's first amendment right to privacy.
Mr. Brand makes an interesting argument because businesses have the same rights as individuals. Treating a corporation as a person is a fundamental and perhaps indispensable way of dealing with such entities in the legal system.
Unfortunately for Mr. Brand and Major League Baseball, baseball is not a business. Football, basketball and, obviously, hockey are businesses but baseball is not. It's the law of the land. In 1922, the Supreme Court decided that because baseball was not considered to be interstate commerce. To this day, baseball retains an exemption to antitrust law. The sport would survive as well as hockey did under true market conditions.
Baseball and Stanley Brand knows that Congress derives it's power to subpoena anybody in the sport from this antitrust exemption. They can subpoena the hotdog vendors and baseball would have to comply. It takes only 2/3rds of Congress to overturn this exemption, and when W is aiming for you along with the rest of the Beltway, making up interpretations of the First Amendment is foolish. If Congress knows anything, it's the meddling First Amendment.
Baseball sucks and would never survive true market conditions. To test this hypothesis, Congress needs to overturn the antitrust exemption. The national pastime is a national joke and goes against their national pride of a free-market economy.
If Stanley Brand and Major League Baseball wants a right to privacy, the American People deserve the right to watch baseball get smacked by the glorious Invisible Hand.
