Baseball Hall of Famer Henry Waxman.

• Author: Green, Joshua
• Position: TILTING at windmills

Fall in Washington can be depressing, especially during a midterm election year. The chance of Congress achieving anything goes from slim to none, as the parties focus on campaigning. And the Washington Redskins' megalomaniacal owner, Dan Snyder, reliably fields an under-performing team that kills off any excitement about the football season. This year, Snyder has managed to add an extra patina of sadness to the whole affair by truculently rejecting calls to change the Redskins' name, which a growing number of people regard as a racial slur. In May, fifty U.S. senators sent a letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell demanding that he force the team to drop its name. Snyder has handled the controversy in classic Washington fashion: by enlisting the services of ex-George W. Bush flak Ari Fleischer and launching a counterattack. Ugh.

Baseball is the one ray of light. The Washington Nationals didn't quite make it to the World Series, but their playoff run generated the kind of palpable excitement Washington sports fans haven't experienced in years. This gives me an opening to propound my theory that Congress--and in particular one congressman, California Representative Henry Waxman--is more responsible for the current state of the game than anyone realizes (possibly including Waxman himself, who isn't a fan). As many baseball commentators have noted, Major League Baseball has become a pitcher's league, so starved for home runs that a lot of people want to lower the pitcher's mound to try and create more offense.

Back in the mid-2000s, Waxman sat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, first as ranking member opposite Republican chairman Tom Davis of Virginia, then as chairman when Democrats won the House in 2006. Waxman was the impetus for the steroid hearings that brought popular sluggers like Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro before Congress. His chief motivation was public health: a 2004 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that steroid abuse among teens and children as young as sixth grade had tripled over a decade. Kids were emulating their 'roid-addled heroes.

To his credit, Davis, who was chairman at the time, agreed that this merited an investigation and hearings. That's how baseball's brightest stars wound up under oath before the Oversight Committee. Unwilling to perjure himself, McGwire all but admitted using steroids. Sosa pretended he couldn't understand English. Thanks to ESPN...