WASHINGTON – Sen. Ted Cruz demanded an end Tuesday to a century-old antitrust exemption for professional baseball, as punishment for a politically “woke” decision to pull its All-Star Game out of Georgia over new voter restrictions.
“They shouldn’t expect to see special goodies from Washington when they are dishonestly acting to favor one party against the other,” he said, denouncing “the rise of the ‘woke’ corporations” that have been siding with Democrats in the tussle over voting rights that erupted since the contested presidential election.
Major League Baseball is the only sports league not subject to federal rules against monopoly behavior, a legal quirk that stems from a 1922 Supreme Court ruling that held, through somewhat tortured logic, that the league didn’t engage in interstate commerce because each game is played in one city at a time.
Over the next 99 years, lawmakers have mounted at least a half-dozen efforts to overturn that exemption. The latest effort, from Cruz and fellow Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Josh Hawley of Missouri, is also part of a running feud between conservatives and team owners in several sports.
During his 2018 reelection bid, Cruz railed against football teams that allowed players to take a knee during the national anthem, a gesture meant to draw attention to police brutality and racism. He has also attacked Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and other basketball team owners, accusing them of caving to pressure from China to avoid criticism of anti-democracy crackdowns.
Lee accused MLB of arrogance emboldened by the unusual legal status.
“It’s a decision you wouldn’t see from an entity that wasn’t insulated from market competition by our antitrust laws,” he said.
But MLB is hardly the only business to express dismay over the GOP-led push to tighten ballot access in recent months, though it’s the only one not subject to federal anti-monopoly law.
Atlanta-based Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola publicly condemned Georgia’s new law, which angered Republicans.
The Texas Rangers declined to comment on the senators’ legislation.
The Georgia law, enacted on March 25, limits the number of ballot drop boxes, strengthens voter identification requirements, bans the use of mobile voting vans, and makes it illegal for anyone to give even a bottle of water to a voter as they wait in line. Gov. Brian Kemp insists the law makes it hard to cheat without impinging on voter access.
Democrats say the law does make voting harder, and blame a false premise that fraud was rampant.
Donald Trump insisted he lost Georgia because of fraud, though he was unable to convince any courts of that. He tried unsuccessfully to browbeat the state’s top election official, also a Republican, into overturning President Joe Biden’s victory.
Cruz insisted Tuesday that MLB has promoted “demonstrably false” misinformation about the intent and effect of Georgia’s law, rejecting the claim it disenfranchises Black voters and others more likely to support Democrats.
Requiring identification to vote is no different from requiring a baseball fan to present an ID to pick up tickets, as teams themselves do, Cruz argued at a Senate news conference to announce the antitrust bill.
Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred announced April 2 that the league would move its All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver “to demonstrate our values.” “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans, and opposes restrictions to the ballot box,” he said.
The league did not immediately respond to the antitrust proposal, which would overturn a unanimous Supreme Court ruling authored by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
That 1922 ruling rejected a claim by the now defunct Federal Baseball Club that the National League should be subject to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The court effectively upheld that ruling in 1953 and 1972.
“This is a league that increasingly wants to exert political influence, and at the same time wants to get government handouts and government subsidies. They just can’t have it both ways,” Hawley said.
“There’s no reason Major League Baseball should enjoy special subsidies,” Cruz said. “The NFL doesn’t have that exception. The NBA doesn’t have that exception. Somehow those sports leagues manage to do just fine. ... It is corporate welfare coming from Washington and in this case, Major League Baseball is behaving with arrogance.”
Cruz noted that Georgia provides two more days of early voting than Colorado, though the law includes a number of provisions that Democrats complain were aimed at curbing access by their supporters.
“This was not about voting. This was about virtue signaling and this was about punishment,” Cruz said. “Major League Baseball made the decision that the more than half of its fans who happen to be Republicans are now disfavored, and that voting voter fraud is not a concern legislatures should focus on.”
“I’m a big Houston Astros fan. I’m happy to cheer on the Rangers as well but I love my Astros,” Cruz said. “There are a lot of baseball fans I know of who are pissed off at this move, but at the same time don’t necessarily want to turn off the TV and stop watching sports. ... They’re counting on the fact that their customers are stuck.”
Staff writer Evan Grant contributed to this report.
