When I turn on ESPN to watch SportsCenter in the morning, I want to see two things: the scores of the games and the best of the highlight reels. And I don’t mind seeing the occasional ESPN commercial with some mega athlete every once in a while.

This is very different from my expectations when I change the channel to C-SPAN. There I expect to see either a Congressional session or a random book review. On the few occasions where I tune the television to some legislative business, I hope to see all the senators and representatives milling about, giving the occasional speech and holding a vote every once in a while.

And this is how I would prefer it to stay: the athletes on ESPN make the highlight reels and the legislators on C-SPAN make laws.

But sadly, this is no longer the case. We have Congress butting in on the realm of sports, which is about as awkward and annoying as watching a golfer try to play football. It’s not pretty.

I refer to the present Spygate and Roger Clemens ‘issues’ that the Senate is investigating: the former regards the alleged videotaping scandal surrounding the New England Patriots and the latter concerns steroid and human growth hormone use allegations against Roger Clemens.

Quite frankly, I think that the NFL and MLB need to take care of Spygate and Clemens, respectively, instead of letting Congress butt in. In fact, I see some much larger and more important issues for our government to take care of, like an unpopular war, a slumping economy, an authoritarian wannabe in the White House and a long list of things to fix.

Actually, it’s ironic that Congress is so involved in Spygate and Roger Clemens. After all, we have a president who illegally spied on everyone, used questionable tactics to obtain information, gave a huge performance enhancement to independent government contractors and then lied about all of it. So what does Congress do? They turn their wrath towards a football team that allegedly spied on another football team and focus their ire on a baseball player who illegally enhanced his pitching performance and then lied to cover this transgression.

Now I know a lot of people hate the Patriots and baseball is America’s pastime. But I wonder if anyone honestly thinks that football and baseball are really more important than what the government does. And no matter how avid a football fan you are, the bottom line is that we actually have to put up with what our government does every day. Baseball is a little boring and football airs only on Sundays and Monday night; the law is on every day.

So here’s what I am asking for: athletes and the organizations they play for stick to playing their sports and making the rules for the game and Congress just makes the laws.

I’m asking the one thing that every boss asks his or her employees to do at some point. Do your job.

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