Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said college athletes should be paid, weighing in for the first time on a controversial issue that's roiling the NCAA and college sports.

"College athletes are workers," the senator from Vermont tweeted Friday morning. "Pay them."

The tweet came in response to one sent by LeBron James, professional basketball player for the Los Angeles Lakers, who was rallying support for SB-206, California's "Fair Pay to Play" Act, which would allow student athletes to earn compensation in connection with the use of their "name, image or likeness."

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The bill overwhelmingly passed the state Senate in May. If approved by the California Assembly in the current legislative session, it would become law in 2023 and apply to all private colleges in the Golden State and the University of California system.

The NCAA opposes the bill, arguing that it would create a dynamic in which the best athletes in the country flock to California schools. NCAA President Mark Emmert threatened to bar California's college teams from participating in national championships and asked state lawmakers to postpone their consideration of the bill until the NCAA conducts its own review about compensating athletes.

College athletics has ballooned over the last two decades into a $14 billion industry with only about 12% of that being directed to students, almost entirely in the form of academic scholarships. The NCAA basketball tournament alone, which is widely known as "March Madness," draws upward of 100 million vierwers, has nearly 100 corporate sponsors and generates more than $1 billion.

While this is the first time Sanders, a top Democratic presidential contender, has weighed in on the issue, he's far from the first member of Congress to call for paying college athletes.

In March, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut published a report, "Madness, Inc: How everyone is getting rich off college sports – except the players," in which he argued the NCAA is broken and that paying athletes is both a labor fairness issue and civil rights issue.