Before we get to the ridiculous stunt the House Minority Leader Hakeem “TEMU Obama” Jeffries pulled yesterday, we know that many of you have seen TV ads talking about the SCORE Act, how it’s going to save college sports and how you need to call your congressman to vote for it – but have zero idea what the act does.

And we can help with that.

A quick summary from Grok…

The SCORE Act (H.R. 4312) is a bipartisan bill aimed at regulating name, image, and likeness (NIL) compensation for college athletes while protecting their rights, promoting fair competition in intercollegiate athletics, and preventing exploitative practices.

Key provisions include prohibiting restrictions on athletes’ NIL deals (with exceptions for conflicts or prohibited payments), mandating transparency in agreements over $600, capping agent fees at 5%, requiring high-revenue schools to provide academic, medical, and career support benefits, barring athletes from employee status, preempting conflicting state laws, and authorizing associations like the NCAA to set rules on recruitment, transfers, and governance with antitrust protections.

Backed by the NCAA, power conferences, U.S. Olympic Committee, and the White House, it seeks to create a national framework amid ongoing NIL chaos and legal challenges.

The House had scheduled a floor vote for December 4, 2025, under a closed rule, but leadership pulled it at the last minute due to internal GOP divisions and opposition from some Republicans who viewed it as overly regulatory or insufficiently protective of athlete rights.

No rescheduled date has been announced.

Essentially, the problem is that NIL payments are beginning to spiral out of control with respect to college football and basketball, and most of your mid-tier Division 1 schools are going to get to the point where not only can’t they compete with the monster programs like Alabama, Texas, Ohio State, LSU, Georgia, Texas A&M, Michigan and the like, but just trying to compete with each other in football and basketball is going to kill their ability to fund the non-revenue sports.

And you can see that as not the biggest problem in the world – and you wouldn’t be totally wrong.

But the U.S. Olympic Committee’s job of winning gold medals gets a lot easier when there are hundreds of universities training athletes in “olympic” sports – every non-revenue sport on a college campus is an “olympic” sport – and so they’re in favor of this bill as a means of hanging on to the advantage we have over the rest of the world.

An advantage we give away to a large extent when American athletic programs recruit heavily on the international stage, and thus train Norwegians, Jamaicans, Australians and Spaniards to compete against us at the Olympics. Still, it’s a net positive.

And everybody knows, because the lawsuits are out there, that not only will the athletes eventually demand to be considered employees of the universities but they’re going to unionize. It’s stupid to do that, but they’re college kids and they don’t really know better. The SCORE Act would put a stop to that.

The antitrust protections for the NCAA might rankle, but it’s hard to see any other way to clear the field for the NCAA to make rules keeping sports vibrant and competitive. And capping the agent fees is smart, because again – these are kids, and many of them come from backgrounds which aren’t overly conducive to being commercially savvy. The agents will rake them over the coals if they don’t get some protection.

People in college sports will tell you that without a sensible and enforceable regulatory regime being reimposed, NIL and the transfer portal will become centrifugal forces that pull college athletics apart.

Maybe that’s a good thing, actually. We’re massive college sports fans here, but let’s face it – the entire rationale of college, as it’s currently set up in America now, is badly fraying. An awful lot of what colleges do nowadays is destructive rather than necessary. And college athletics, and the emotional pull it creates with so many of us who are alumni, is serving as a barrier to the kind of sea change we really ought to be considering given the trillions of dollars in student debt, accumulated capital in endowments which doesn’t serve to educate anybody, wasted effort in credentialism which doesn’t reflect competence… we could go on.

But college sports is awesome, and even if there ought to be massive reforms in the delivery of higher education it’s still a good idea to try to create something sustainable.

So Congress was going to try to pass the SCORE Act. It’s mostly a Republican bill, but there is a decent amount of Democrat support for it.

TEMU Obama isn’t in favor, though. And that has nothing to do with the merits of the SCORE Act, so you’ll know. TEMU Obama wants to kill the SCORE Act because he wants to kill everything the Republican leadership is trying to do, whether Democrats like it or not.

By the way, we call him TEMU Obama because Dollar-Store Obama just doesn’t work to describe Hakeem Jeffries. A dollar store might be a shabby place, but at least it’s a legitimate business that services poor people. TEMU, on the other hand, is a scammy Chinese app selling counterfeit and defective goods which is actually a delivery mechanism for spyware; it’s a lot more sinister than a dollar store is.

So he’s TEMU Obama.

And while there were Republicans who weren’t sold on the SCORE Act – it might well need some tweaking; we’re not going to pretend to know all the ins and outs of this legislation – Jeffries did everything he could to get the Democrats to blow it up.

So he attacked Lane Kiffin and said the bill was for Kiffin’s protection.

House Dem Leader Hakeem Jeffries attacks Lane Kiffin from the halls of Congress. pic.twitter.com/XDnDncpXvj

— Peter Hamby (@PeterHamby) December 4, 2025

This is idiotic, as is everything else that comes out of Jeffries’ mouth. The bill doesn’t protect Kiffin and LSU. It protects coaches at places like Louisiana Tech and Tulane and Fordham and Wagner, whose programs will be in jeopardy of going away when the price of participation in Division 1 sports rises to the point where their universities can’t pay it.

But Hakeem Jeffries gives not a single fig about that. What he wants is to prevent Mike Johnson and Steve Scalise from passing anything at all, whether his members might actually support it or not. And because the GOP House majority is as small as it is, it doesn’t take much for Jeffries to pull that obstruction off.

To answer his question about why the House would be moving the SCORE Act, it’s pretty simple: this is one of the few pieces of legislation active on Capitol Hill that has bipartisan support of any kind, and so Johnson and Scalise are trying to get it and others like it across the rotunda to the Senate.

Where it would probably get filibustered, because Chuck Schumer has the same motivation Jeffries does.

It’s amazing that Lane Kiffin would be used as the reason to kill a piece of legislation that everybody in college sports is asking for, but that’s where we are.

And to those of you who turn up your noses at those of us who still care about college sports, trash like this is why. We’ve got to have an escape from the daily exploits of morons like TEMU Obama every now and then, and college sports, unlike modern American politics, is still more or less a meritocracy.

Which makes it VERY different from Hakeem Jeffries.