Congress and Sports
The Box Score
U.S. Constitution provides several ways for Congress to involve itself with sports, the most important of which is the Commerce Clause.
Congress introduces a lot of bills and resolutions on sports (2,822 from 1973-2022).
The number of sports bills introduced in Congress has increased dramatically since the early 2000s. In the 2010s, Congress averaged 176 sports bills per session.
Most congressional action on sports is ceremonial in nature; very few of the bills that matter become law.
The few sports bills that become law tend to enjoy bipartisan support.
The Complete Game
In 2011, the United States teetered on the brink of financial disaster. What got us there was a congressional vote to raise the debt ceiling, which is the maximum debt the U.S. can legally carry. The debt ceiling vote is usually pro forma, but Tea Party Republicans, emboldened by their success in the 2010 midterms, decided to use it as a cudgel to force the Obama administration to make deep cuts in entitlement programs. President Obama countered that any deficit reduction plan must include tax increases on the wealthiest Americans. Neither side was willing to budge.
President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner attempted to resolve the 2011 debt ceiling crisis in one of their “Nicorette (Obama) and Merlot (Boehner) sessions.” Source
The longer the crisis dragged on, the more hopeless it all looked. Failure meant the U.S. would default on its obligations, a possibility that then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke called “calamitous,” and the IMF deemed “catastrophic.”
After six months of bickering and just two days before the deadline, the White House and congressional Republicans finally agreed to a Band-Aid solution. America narrowly avoided going over a fiscal cliff, only to speed toward it again just two years later.
The Wilt Chamberlain, U.S. Postage Stamp. Source
One might think this high-stakes game of fiscal chicken would leave little time for Congress to think of anything else. Not so. During the same six months, Congress introduced 51 bills and held three hearings on sports. Among these was a bill to congratulate the Dallas Mavericks on winning the NBA Championship, a resolution urging the Postal Service to issue a commemorative stamp in honor of Wilt Chamberlain, and a hearing on racist mascots.
The stark contrast between the debt ceiling vote and, say, a Wilt Chamberlain stamp raises several questions. What gives Congress the right to involve itself in sports? How and why does it do so? And doesn’t Congress have anything better to do?
This article is the first in a series exploring how Congress shapes the way we watch and play sports. It reports findings drawn from a unique dataset that includes every bill and resolution on sports introduced in Congress from 1973 to 2022 (thanks to my student, Caleb Liebengood, for bringing this analysis up-to-date). You can check out how I built this dataset by going to the Methods section.
Several conclusions emerge from this birds-eye view of Congress and sports. First, the U.S. Constitution says nothing about sports but provides several ways for Congress to get into the game. Second, Congress introduces a lot of bills and resolutions on sports, a number that has increased dramatically in recent years. Most of these bills/resolutions are ceremonial in nature and don’t matter in the grand scheme of things; very few of the bills that matter become law. Third, the sports bills that become law tend to enjoy bipartisan support.
You’ll notice that I’ve ducked the most obvious question of all: Doesn’t Congress have anything better to do than worry about sports? I’ll discuss this in future posts, where I’ll go out on a limb and argue that Congress’s involvement in sports is usually warranted and beneficial. As we will see, this is not a popular take. But save this for another time. For now, let’s look at some of the basics.
What you need to know before we begin.
You need to know a few terms and concepts before we get to how and why Congress involves itself in sports. Feel free to skip this section if you got a B+ or better in Political Science 101.
Bills. A bill is a legislative proposal before Congress. Bills that originate in the House have the designation H.R.; in the Senate, it is S.; both are then numbered sequentially by date of introduction (e.g., H.R. 1875 or S.456).
Resolutions. There are technically three different types of resolutions: joint (H.J. Res or S. J Res), concurrent (H.Con.Res or S.Con.Res), or simple (H.Res or S.Res). You can read more about resolutions here. For our purposes, there are really only two types of resolutions: those that matter and those that do not. An example of a meaningful resolution is H.Con.Res 249, which expressed congressional support for boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics. An example of a meaningless resolution (at least meaningless for most people) is S.Res 317, congratulating the Milwaukee Bucks for winning the 2021 NBA Championship.
[NOTE: It may be tempting to think of bills as something tangible and resolutions as mere words. That would be a mistake. Some bills are pure fluff, and some resolutions are a big deal.]
Public law. A bill becomes public law (Pub.L) once it passes both houses of Congress and the president signs it (there are variations of this general process, but we’ll ignore them for the moment).
The legislative process. The following provides a brief refresher on how a bill becomes law. I won’t cover everything, but just enough for you to understand what follows. The reader should know that there are many variations to the standard process described below.
1. Introduction of a bill. A member of Congress introduces a bill by throwing it into the Hopper, a box next to the Clerk’s desk. The bill is then referred to the appropriate committee. For our purposes, we’ll consider those bills that die in committee, which is most of them, as being “Introduced.”
The “Hopper” is where House bills are introduced. Source
2. Reported by Committee. After referral to the appropriate committee, the bill usually goes to a subcommittee (see House Committees and Senate Committees for the 117th Congress). After some amendments and maybe a hearing, the subcommittee votes on the bill. If they like it, it goes to the full committee and they repeat the process. If the bill passes the full committee, it is considered “reported.” [A brief note on the power of committee and subcommittee chairs: committees receive far more bills than they can consider. The committee chair, who is always a majority party member, largely determines which bills are on the agenda. Minority party bills are rarely considered. So, it is good to be in the majority, and even better to be the chair.]
3. House Floor. Bills considered before the full House or Senate are said to be “on the floor.” Most bills get to the House floor by coming up on one of four calendars, usually in the order they passed out of committee. The Speaker of the House can also jump some bills to the front of the line. The House Rules Committee determines the length of debate, the number and nature of amendments, and can waive specific points of order. Unlike the Senate, House procedures are rigid, formal, and designed so that the majority party almost always wins.
4. Senate Floor. Most bills are brought to the Senate floor by unanimous consent agreement (UCA), which is just as it sounds: all senators must agree to consider a bill, and any one of them can gum up the works by issuing a “hold.” Unlike the House, there is no set time for debating a bill nor a limit on the number of amendments. These rules allow filibustering, which is talking a bill to death. The only way to stop a filibuster is by a vote of cloture, which takes 60 senators. In contrast to the House, the Senate’s rules are less formal, getting things done requires supermajorities, and the minority party has considerable power.
5. Resolutions Agreed To. We’ll see that most congressional action on sports is ceremonial, along the lines of recognizing the Mavericks for winning the NBA Championship. “Agreeing to” (i.e., passing) these types of commemorative resolutions is far easier in the Senate than in the House. A senator on the floor can ask for unanimous consent to recognize some team, and since the Senate chamber is usually empty, no one is there to object and the motion is agreed to. You can see an example of this in Senator Jerry Moran’s (R-KS) recognition of the Kansas Jayhawk’s 2022 NCAA Basketball Championship (the parliamentary move in question occurs around the 7:18 mark).
Passing ceremonial resolutions is more difficult in the House because of its cumbersome rules, procedures, and scheduling. Representatives can sometimes move to suspend the rules and ask for unanimous consent to pass their resolution. In most cases, however, they must wait until their ceremonial bill or resolution comes up on one of the calendars, which it rarely does.
6. Bill Signed by President. A bill becomes law once passed in identical form by both houses of Congress and signed by the president.
With the preliminaries out of the way, let’s turn to Congress’s involvement with sports.
What gives Congress the right to get involved with sports?
No specific clause in the Constitution gives Congress the right to, say, concern itself with concussions in football, scold MLB players for using steroids, or allow sports leagues to blackout games. Nevertheless, it does all of these things and more. So, where does Congress get off doing all this stuff?
The primary source of congressional involvement in sports is:
ArtI.S8.C3.1 The Commerce Clause. The Constitution gives Congress the right “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” It is hard to imagine what is not interstate commerce in the modern world. Consider, for instance, that Riddell ships helmets from its North Ridgeville, Ohio facility to football players across America. That is interstate commerce, and it gives Congress the right to look into concussions in football. It used to be the case that computer bots swiped up all the World Series tickets before you had a chance to buy them. Congress banned that practice thanks to the Commerce Clause. Now, it is time for an easy quiz question: Is it interstate commerce when the New York Yankees travel north to play the Sox in Fenway? The answer is obviously “yes”: the pros play for money, and New York and Massachusetts are two different states. Surprisingly, however, Congress didn’t see it that way until 1998. And because it didn’t, Major League Baseball operated as a monopoly, much like Standard Oil. In many ways, it still does. I’ll discuss this strange case in a future article.
Congress has additional powers beyond the Commerce Clause to justify its involvement in sports. Here are a few examples:
ArtI.S8.C1.1 Taxing Power. Pub.L 114-239 exempts Olympians from paying taxes on prize money, and H.R. 3965 aimed to revoke the NFL’s tax-exempt status.
ArtI.S8.C1.2 Spending Power. The Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 (H.R. 1105, Pub.L. 111–8) authorized $9,800,000 for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
ArtI.S8.C4.1 Naturalization Power. H.R. 573 would have allowed Cuban baseball players to play in the MLB despite the U.S. embargo.
ArtI.S8.C5.1 Coinage Power. Pub.L. 97-220 authorized the minting of commemorative coins to support the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games.
ArtI.S8.C7.1 Postal Power. S. 642 would have offered reduced postage rates for mailers sent by the USOC.
ArtI.S8.C8.1 Copyrights and Patents. H.R. 1278 attempted to strip trademark protection from the Washington Redskins because their team name was racist.
ArtI.S8.C14.1 Power to Govern and Regulate Land and Naval Forces. Pub.L 115-91 limits the release of military service academy graduates to participate in professional sports.
ArtI.S8.C17.1 Power over the Seat of Government (The District of Columbia). H.R. 1998 would have allowed the District of Columbia to tax non-resident professional athletes.
ArtI.S8.C18.1 The Necessary and Proper Clause. If Congress can’t find constitutional justification in the clauses above, they can always cite the Necessary and Proper Clause for doing what they want. The Framers of the Constitution couldn’t anticipate all the powers that Congress would need in the future, so they provided wiggle room in the form of the Necessary and Proper Clause (a.k.a., the Elastic Clause). This clause gives Congress unwritten powers (i.e., “implied powers”) to carry out its written powers (i.e., “enumerated powers”). For example, nothing in the Constitution says Congress can charter a national bank. But the Supreme Court case McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) held that Congress needed to do so to carry out its expressed duty to regulate commerce. It is hard to point to specific sports bills and say, “Congress used the Necessary and Proper Clause to justify this one or that.” Instead, Congress usually does what it wants and only cites the Clause after some party takes them to federal court.
Categories of Sports Bills and Resolutions.
My research examines every bill or resolution on sports introduced in Congress from 1973-2022. I classified each into one of four categories:
Substantive. Substantive bills make meaningful changes to sports. Consider the following examples. Mark DeSaulnier’s (D-CA-11) HR 5616 withheld federal funds for schools that fail to implement a concussion protocol. Senator Maria Cantwell’s (D-WA) S.2333 required equal pay for male and female athletes. And Doris Matsui’s (D-CA-6) HR 4150 provided Covid-relief funds to minor league baseball teams. (Incidentally, none of these bills passed).
Commemorative. These bills or resolutions commemorate or congratulate a sports figure or team. Examples include congratulating the Tampa Bay Lightning for winning the 2021 Stanley Cup (S.Res. 312), giving Bobby Bowden a Congressional Gold Medal (H.R. 4689), and recognizing those Olympians that hail from Minnesota (H.Res. 625).
Resolutions. This category contains resolutions that make a meaningful statement on sports but don’t do anything tangible. One example is H.Con.Res 249, which expressed congressional support for boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics but did not mandate it.
Appropriations. Appropriations bills specify what the government can spend money on and how much. In theory, each of the 12 Appropriations Subcommittees in the House and Senate should produce a bill funding 12 different aspects of government. Because of congressional dysfunction, however, it rarely works like this anymore. Instead, the Appropriations Committee often rolls several bills together in a must-pass omnibus appropriation bill, or they keep the lights on through continuing resolutions. An example of an appropriations bill that briefly mentioned sports is H.R. 7617, which provided $2.5 million to prevent the sexual abuse of Olympic athletes and barred any federal money from going to Trump’s golf courses. It is important to note that sports usually take up only a line or two in appropriation bills that can run a thousand pages or more.
Congress introduces a lot of bills and resolutions on sports.
From 1973-2020, Congress introduced 2,822 bills/resolutions on sports. Whether that is a lot or a little is a judgment call; I say it is a lot.
The chart below shows that dramatic rise in the number of bills/resolutions introduced in Congress. The 110th Congress (2007-2009) set the record of 228 bills introduced in a session. The sharp decline during the 112th and 113th Congresses resulted from House Republicans’ ban on commemorative bills, but the number jumped as soon as the practice was restored. Even with the temporary dip, Congress still averaged 176 sports bills per session throughout the 2010s.
Bills/Resolutions on Sports Introduced in Congress, 1973-2020
The figure below shows that when it comes to sports, Congress spends roughly half its time congratulating athletes and the other half on meaningful things. What stands out, other than the fact Congress does a bunch of commemorative stuff, is the relative infrequency of sports appropriations (2%). On the one hand, this isn’t a surprise since appropriations bills are few (~24 per year) while authorization bills are many (~12,000). On the other hand, the paltry sums appropriated to sports by Congress show how unique the U.S. is in the sporting world. Most other nations heavily fund their sports programs; many even have a Ministry of Sport. By contrast, the U.S. federal government devotes little money to sports. For example, the French government spends approximately €40 billion annually on sports, while the U.S. rarely appropriates more than a few million dollars. As we will see, the U.S. government’s relationship with sports is like a strict and stingy parent to their child: there are a lot of rules but not much money.
Bills/Resolutions Introduced in Congress, 1973-2020.
I should note two caveats to the statement that the U.S. government doesn’t fund sports like other countries. First, while the federal government may not spend much on sports, states and localities certainly do. They fund public high school and college sports, often lavishly. In fact, a coach is the highest-paid public employee in 39 states. State and local governments also use billions of tax dollars to build sports stadiums. Second, if we consider tax breaks an expenditure, which we should, the federal government spends more than it might appear. More on both points in a future post.
The highest-paid public employee in all 50 states. Source
Substantive legislation is the stuff that can make headlines. The following table shows the ten most frequent targets of congressional sports bills from 1973-2022. Heading the list is “organization,” a catchall term for any piece of legislation dictating the rules or procedures of a sports governing body. For example, H.R. 5817: The NCAA Accountability Act of 2021, sought to establish due process requirements for investigating student-athletes. The biggest mover on the list is “player safety.” Until the late 2000s, Congress didn’t care much about the welfare of athletes. But the mounting evidence of a link between contact sports and CTE spurred Congress to introduce several bills to make sports safer, especially for younger kids.
Bills and resolutions by category.
Very few sports bills become law.
While Congress might introduce many sports bills, very few become law. The chart below shows that most sports bills die in committee (2,095 bills/resolutions), which isn’t surprising since most bills die in committee. Seventy-five bills made their way out of committee only to go nowhere; another 138 passed one chamber but not the other. There were 808 resolutions agreed to, most by unanimous consent. Ultimately, from 1973 to 2020, only 148 sports bills became law. The chance a sports bill becomes law (~4%) is consistent with the historical average for all bills.
Sports Bills/Resolutions by the Highest Stage Reached in the Legislative Process, 1973-2020
The bills that do pass tend to enjoy widespread, bipartisan support.
Although most sports bills die in committee, those that come up for a floor vote pass by a wide margin. Of the 126 bills that came to the House floor, the average vote was 380 Ayes to 12 Nays; in the seven bills before the Senate, the average was 86 to 7. In fact, I found only one bill that lost a floor vote, H.R. 1065, a 2005 bill that sought to establish a U.S. boxing commission.
Sports bills exemplify the legislative process in most ways but are different in one crucial respect. Let’s first consider what sports bills have in common with other types of bills. There are far more bills introduced than Congress can consider. Most of these bills die in committee; very few become law. Once the two-year congressional term ends, all pending bills die. As such, lawmakers tend to submit the same bill session-after-session (e.g., Tom Coburn’s Pro Sports Act was introduced nine times). All of this shows it is far easier to play defense in Congress (i.e., kill a bill you don’t like) than offense (i.e., pass a bill that you want). Simply put, sports bills are like any other bill.
Now the difference. While sports bills are strongly bipartisan, most recent bills are not. As I’ve argued elsewhere, polarization is the defining feature of contemporary American politics. That means congressional Democrats vote with other Democrats, Republicans with other Republicans, and rarely the twain shall meet. Akhil Jalan, a student at UC Berkeley’s Applied Mathematics & Computer Science, shows that party unity votes have dramatically increased over time. And since party unity votes are rising, bipartisan votes must decrease accordingly. But, somehow, sports bills defy this trend.
The percent of party unity votes, 1950 to 2020. Source
Why do sports bills produce a bipartisan love-fest when almost everything else feels like a bare-knuckled fight? First, there are divisive sports bills in Congress, but they usually don’t make it very far. For instance, Matt Gaetz (R-FL-1) wrote a bill to force the USWNT to stand for the national anthem, and Greg Steube (R-FL-17) introduced legislation to ban transgender athletes. Neither bill had a snowball’s chance in hell of passing in the Democratic-controlled 116th House. Second, despite the politicization of American sports, there is still a lot of agreement. Democrats and Republicans alike object to Russia’s state-sponsored doping, want to protect young athletes from sexual abuse, and hate it when computer bots buy up all the tickets. A third and related point is that party leaders might expedite the consideration of sports bills because they know they can pass. As everything else in Congress grinds to a halt, maybe lawmakers can point to some sports bill and say, “Hey, look! We’re doing something, and it’s bipartisan to boot!” The final reason is that most bills pass with bipartisan support. The Senate filibuster means that most bills need a bipartisan supermajority of 60 to make it through the chamber. So, maybe sports bills aren’t so unique after all.
Top 5 Sports Laws
This is a list of the most ambitious bills on sports that never became law.
A few tidbits for trivia night.
Democrats are more likely to introduce a bill on sports. I don’t think that means they like sports any more than Republicans. Instead, I suspect that Republicans are likely to introduce fewer bills in general. After all, there isn’t much incentive to write a lot of bills if your philosophy is that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
Bills and Resolutions on Sport by Political Party, 1973-2020
2. Congressional bills, especially substantive ones, tend to mention multiple sports or use the general words “sports” or “athletes” (874 bills/resolutions). Next in order of number comes the Olympics (439), baseball (361), football (279), and basketball (258). Congress has yet to mention pickleball.
Congressional Bills/Resolutions by Sport, 1973-2020.
3. The table below shows the ten most prolific authors of sports bills. Bill Nelson led the league with 20. Some of these folks were big sports fans, but most are on this list because they served in Congress for decades.
The members of Congress who have introduced the most sports bills.
