B.C.S. Threats Show It’s Time to Dust Off the Tenth Amendment

If not, com­ing right on the heels of the skul­dug­gery and royal huffi­ness over the health care boon­dog­gle, then there won’t ever be a point at which the pub­lic says That’s far enough.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama admin­is­tra­tion is con­sid­er­ing sev­eral steps that would review the legal­ity of the con­tro­ver­sial Bowl Cham­pi­onship Series, the Jus­tice Depart­ment said in a let­ter Fri­day to a sen­a­tor who had asked for an antitrust review.

In the let­ter to Sen. Orrin Hatch, obtained by The Asso­ci­ated Press, Assis­tant Attor­ney Gen­eral Ronald Weich wrote that the Jus­tice Depart­ment is review­ing Hatch’s request and other mate­ri­als to deter­mine whether to open an inves­ti­ga­tion into whether the BCS vio­lates antitrust laws.

Read­ing the arti­cle I felt like Joseph Welch must have when he said to Joseph McCarthy

Sen­a­tor. You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Have these peo­ple not the decency to read the doc­u­ment they have sworn to pro­tect and defend?  OK.  For­get decency.  How about A sin­gle lick of sense? I know that who wins foot­ball games is a big deal for some col­leges because it means really seri­ous money.  That is their prob­lem because that is a trap they have made for them­selves.  Insti­tu­tions of higher learn­ing really don’t have any busi­ness being farm teams for the National Foot­ball League.  But they are. Insti­tu­tions of higher learn­ing really don’t have any busi­ness spend­ing mil­lions research­ing high school foot­ball play­ers, writ­ing elab­o­rate agree­ments with them, and engag­ing in Byzan­tine arrange­ments with other schools to make sure that no school is get­ting an unfair advan­tage in the area of snar­ing likely stars for their foot­ball teams.  But they do.

Dumb?  Yeah.  Silly?  Yeah.  Venal?  Yeah.  Dis­cred­itable?  Yeah.  Big money involved?  Yeah.

But how for the love of Mike does all this have any­thing to do with the fed­eral gov­ern­ment? After all the hoopla has died and all the pom-​​poms put back and the coaches have flown home in their pri­vate jets (when Nick Sabin was at LSU he had a two-​​million-​​dollar salary) this is finally a game between school boys.

Is there any dif­fer­ence between our gov­ern­ment not lik­ing the way they pick bowl con­tes­tants and King George III get­ting mad at they way they ran a fox hunt?  Or Sad­dam, Udai, and Qusai not lik­ing the way a soc­cer match turned out?

Oh, but they will say, We have a stake in this because these schools get fed­eral dol­lars.

Exactly! But they weren’t always fed­eral dol­lars, were they?  They once belonged to real peo­ple who prob­a­bly had bet­ter uses for them than hand­ing them out to col­leges so the gov­ern­ment could force the col­leges to do things its way.

I never heard any­body men­tion the 10^th Amend­ment until last year.  Wasn’t exactly sure what it was and had to look it up.  It’s the one which says that pow­ers that the Con­sti­tu­tion doesn’t explic­itly grant the fed­eral gov­ern­ment are reserved to the states or to the people.

You might think the fact that this amend­ment is get­ting talked about would inform some peo­ple that per­haps it is time to try and act like they’re not com­pletely beyond help.  But they are behav­ing like the mon­key in the mon­key trap, where the mon­key puts his greedy lit­tle paw inside a vase with a nar­row neck to get some good­ies and then can’t get his arm out because he won’t undo his fist and let the good­ies drop.  So he is stuck there until the hunter comes along and takes him back to be the guest of honor at a dinner.

The ele­ments of Amer­i­can life are the good­ies and they want to grab as much as they can and, once hav­ing grabbed, will never let go until they are forced to.

Peo­ple of good sense will prob­a­bly assume that I am mak­ing this up.  I assure them I am not.

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Tags: 10th amendment, BCS, monkey trap, politicians