I don’t personally know Lance Armstrong, the cyclist who won the Tour de France seven times, including after beating cancer.
I don’t know if Armstrong tricked folks for all those years he was competing, finding some ingenious way to pass more than 500 drug tests even while doping, as witnesses tell the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
I don’t know what to make of the USADA’s doping charges, but, as for the agency’s motivations, a federal judge wrote that, “USADA’s conduct raises serious questions about whether its real interest in charging Armstrong is to combat doping, or if it is acting according to less noble motives.”
And I don’t know whether Armstrong chose to drop his challenge to the USADA charges against him because after years of fighting the agency, as he wrote, “enough is enough,” or, as USADA contends, there was ample “evidence” that “Armstrong used . . . and administered doping products.”
But there is something I know. I know where we can cut some federal spending.
On the Opposing Views blog, Tim Dockery points out that USADA “receives almost 70 percent of its funding from the federal grants” and “is a government program masquerading as a non-profit organization. This non-profit status allows it to investigate and prosecute athletes without affording them the constitutional and due process protections required of other federal agencies.”
Why is the federal government paying to police sport? In a way that undermines our standard of justice? When we’re already 16 trillion in debt and butting in costs money?
Yes, “enough is enough.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.