Specter needs to get a clue

Once again.....Congress is doing the people's business:

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) wanted to hear the NFL's explanation for the purging of evidence in the infamous "Spygate" case involving the New England Patriots. He wrote commissioner Roger Goodell on Nov. 15. He got no response.

Specter, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote Goodell again more than a month later, after getting no acknowledgment to the initial communication.

Two days before the Super Bowl, there is plenty of response.

In a phone interview Thursday with The New York Times, Specter said the committee at some point will call on Goodell to discuss why the league destroyed the tapes that revealed the Patriots had been spying on the competition.

"That requires an explanation," Specter told The Times. "The NFL has a very preferred status in our country with their antitrust exemption. The American people are entitled to be sure about the integrity of the game. It's analogous to the CIA destruction of tapes, or any time you have records destroyed."

Words cannot even describe how misplaced Senator Specter's priorities are if this, of all things, is what he is most worried about. We've got a war, terrorism, a potential recession, a crisis with the cost of health care, and immigration woes.....but let's haul the NFL Commissioner before the Senate to address an issue where no laws were broken and no harm was done to anybody.

Frankly, Specter's actually pretty clueless on the issues too. 1957's Radovich v. National Football League established that the NFL does not have the same type of antitrust immunity that was granted to baseball, so I'm not even sure how Congress has skin in this game.

This is beyond stupid, and Specter should feel foolish for even broaching the subject....

UPDATE (11:46 PM): No sooner than I post this I go to ESPN and see that there is a Q&A about what Specter is referring to regarding antitrust law. But this seems to be the main crux for the NFL:

What is Specter talking about when he talks about the NFL's "antitrust exemption"? Specter is talking about a law known as the Sports Broadcasting Act that is the legal and economic foundation of the NFL, the most successful enterprise in the history of sports. There is no faster way to capture the attention of NFL owners and commissioner Roger Goodell than to suggest that Congress could revisit the law that allows NFL owners to pool their television rights, sell them as a package, and split the profits equally. Enacted in 1961, the law is the single most important factor in the league's success. Without the law, each franchise would be selling its television rights individually, which would result in the big-market teams making big money and a team like Green Bay going out of business.

So.....who really knows, other than another Senator is realistically sticking his nose where it doesn't belong.