More Blumenthal trivia: Discipline football players

With futile imperial wars raging in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the federal budget deficit exploding the national debt into the trillions, unfunded liabilities on both the state and federal level promising insolvency everywhere, international tensions rising amid a trade war, and hateful political partisanship incapacitating the country, Connecticut U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal wants the federal government to start regulating the National Football League because the league allows some players to keep playing after being accused of abusing their wives or girlfriends.

Blumenthal’s rationale for the regulation he proposes is that “players are role models to countless Americans, many of them young.”

But bad behavior is hardly peculiar to football players. It is publicized every day among all sorts of celebrities — actors and actresses, business executives, even elected officials themselves — and somehow people manage to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones without any help from the federal government.

People don’t have to patronize professional football. Indeed, the recent spate of kneeling during the national anthem by football players protesting racial injustice seems to have cost the NFL stadium attendance and television viewership.

Blumenthal seems to think that the NFL is more obliged to discipline its players because it enjoys exemption from federal antitrust law. So the senator threatens to introduce legislation to repeal that exemption if the league doesn’t get tougher on domestic violence. But except for its political influence as a rich special interest, the NFL would not have an antitrust exemption in the first place, and Blumenthal shouldn’t wait for any action by the league against domestic violence before introducing repeal legislation.

Besides, the federal government does not try to punish any other businesses, industries, or occupations for not disciplining employees for misconduct off the job in their personal lives. Not even the federal government itself disciplines its employees for misconduct off the job short of serious criminal conviction. Sanctions for misconduct off the job are left to the criminal courts, and if that misconduct is serious enough, criminals are jailed and no longer can be employed anyway. Criminals also may be sued for damages, and if, as with pro football players, they have money, they will be sued.

So what is the federal issue here? Only, it seems, that Senator Blumenthal couldn’t get on TV last week by saying anything substantial. But then his electoral successes suggest that he well understands the triviality of his constituents.

Preserve criminal records: Upon release from prison, former criminals have trouble finding jobs and housing, so the Malloy administration has proposed repeatedly, without success, to suppress criminal records as if the public has no right or need to know the backgrounds of potential tenants and employees.

Now students from Yale Law School are urging a state study commission to prevent landlords from accessing the criminal records of rental applicants. Meanwhile another study commission wants to reduce the maximum sentence for a misdemeanor conviction to a day less than a year so illegal immigrants convicted of misdemeanors won’t be as exposed to deportation by the federal government.

State government itself should provide transitional housing and jobs for former convicts, criminal records should remain public, and the criminal law should not be weakened to facilitate illegal immigration.