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Are the Feds now making mlb into a victim?

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by The Big Ragu, May 19, 2008.

  1. digger

    digger New Member

    Um, I also said the feds would have to go through the process and obtain a search warrant/subpoena. If they do it right and get it, fine. If not, fine also. So, no.
     
  2. digger

    digger New Member

    I'm not sure. Once again, they'd have to be able to present enough evidence to show that it's not a "fishing expedition'', that there's an actual target and the people involved are likely to have information.
     
  3. jgmacg

    jgmacg Guest

    The Wal-Mart parallel's imprecise for sure, BR, but I think the notion of granting the Fed unfettered access to workplace drug-test results in the course of an investigation is a mighty slippery slope. There's always going to be some authoritarian "probable cause" against which to balance the diminishment of our rights against unfair search and seizure.
     
  4. As far as "chilling effects" go, I suggest folks read up on Board of Ed. vs. Earls and the earlier, Vernonia decision, in both of which this Supreme Court essentially determined that high-school students have no Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights. Raise a couple of generations under those rules, and make sure they get drug-tested without cause all through the workplace, and the Fourth and Fifth will have been subcontracted out of existence with government's having to do anything at all.
    As to this, it is in the interest of MLB to maintain some modus vivendi with the MLBPA -- the collusion of the 1980's guaranteed 20 years of bad blood -- so I'm not so sure that MLB wouldn't be involved in maintaining the integrity of a deal it cut with the union.
     
  5. 21

    21 Well-Known Member

    macg--If a newspaper (or Wal-Mart) commissioned a major governmental study of itself, and allowed its employees to be named as drug users, I wouldn't have a problem with the federal government looking deeper into the subject. MLB's decision to drop the matter and decline to prosecute doesn't extend to the feds.

    Different story if the Feds launched this thing in the absence of MLB's very public airing of its dirty laundry.
     
  6. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    I'll agree it was stupid for MLB to commission an investigation of itself. But from an employee's standpoint it shouldn't matter that your stupid employer red-flagged its testing program. The employees -- the people who will potentially be damaged by the revelation of confidential drug testing -- didn't agree to or commission the Mitchell Report.

    MLB, by the way, has no choice but to defend the confidentiality of the provision in the agreement it made or such promises will be considered worthless.
     
  7. The Big Ragu

    The Big Ragu Moderator Staff Member

    FB, Vernonia and Board of Ed vs. Earls has nothing to do with this. The Feds didn't compel the mlb players to submit to the tests they know the results of as a precondition to play baseball. They couldn't anyhow, because they don't have that kind of jurisdiction over major league baseball.

    And either way, Board of Ed vs. Earls is the biggest bunch of much ado about nothing ever made into a faux issue.

    First off, no kid has ever been compelled to take a drug test.

    And a kid who wants to play high school football being asked to pee in a cup is having his "rights" violated about as much as that kid is when his math teacher insists he take a quiz. Kids have always been subject to rules of adults at school, presumably for their own good.

    You can argue, perhaps, whether drug testing serves any good. But there is nothing in the Constitution that even remotely touches on the issue any more than the Constitution makes it violation of a kid's rights to require the kid to get a doctor's check-up in order to attend school or walk through a metal detector to gain access to the building.
     
  8. jgmacg

    jgmacg Guest

    21, that's all true as far as it goes. But here's an honest question - and anyone feel free to correct me: do we consider the Mitchell Report an official product of the Federal Government? Wasn't Mitchell privately hired by MLB as an investigator/consultant? It's not like he had the subpoena power even a congressional subcommittee might have.

    I'm less than sanguine about the Feds piggybacking off an extra-congressional investigation.

    Back to my bad comparison, if Wal-Mart hires Jimmy Carter to explore methamphetamine use among its employees, are the results of that investigation sufficient to bring law enforcement down on the heads of those who were told their drug test results would be held confidential?
     

  9. Gee, not reading the whole post is a problem.
    Leaving aside the fact that, prior to Vernonia and Earls, there was a presumption of a Fourth and Fifth Amendment right against drug-testing in the schools - That's why there wasn't any. That's why the school boards brought the cases. -- my point was that, because of this ongoing idiocy, we are raising a generation of children who will become adults not knowing that they have these rights at all. Couple that with the losy job we do in teaching the Constitution, and the fact that it regularly butchered in our pop culture, and the Bill of Rights at some point becomes a wall-hanging.
    All of the insistence on drug-testing is of a piece with this. Hence, why I summoned up these two decisions which are, IMHO, among the worst ever handed down.
     
  10. cranberry

    cranberry Well-Known Member

    The Mitchell investigation was an instance in which a private company, MLB, hired a private lawyer, George Mitchell, to conduct an internal investigation of itself without the consent of the union that represents the employees. It was Bud Selig's way of demonstrating to history that he wasn't trying to hide anything.
     
  11. 21

    21 Well-Known Member

    Ragu--High school athletic associations in several states (need to see which) have already initiated random drug testing programs for high school players. Those kids are definitely being compelled to take drug tests.
     
  12. buckweaver

    buckweaver Active Member

    MLB has always "covered it up." Doesn't matter what it is, or how badly it speaks of baseball. From gambling into the 1920s (and even after), from segregation into the 1950s, from the Reserve Clause into the 1970s, from collusion in the 1980s and PEDs into the present day.

    MLB can always be counted on to hide its own dirty laundry, whether committed by players, by management, or both. Even when it would look better for baseball to air it out -- they'll still cover it up, just out of force of habit.
     
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