Have they gone too far yet?

By sheer luck, I happened to be watching C-SPAN at my mom's yesterday when I happened to chance upon Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a Republican, actually APOLOGIZING for something he said was slipped into the budget bill by "some staffer."



Apparently, what was slipped into the "thousands of pages" referred to by John McCain in the same extraordinary exchange, was a provision that would allow certain chairpeople of Senate committees to gain access to ANYONE's IRS data. Presumably this provision was aimed at the prosecutor who's going after Tom DeLay.



This kind of a provision makes Nixon's old enemies list look like a guest list for a garden party. It would allow Senate committee chairs to investigate anyone sniffing around anything that stinks....like oh, say, the way Ohio's elections were run.



Charles Grassley, another Republican, was also furious.



Josh Marshall has more, and apparently it wasn't "some staffer", it was added at the request of one of Tom DeLay's buddies, Rep. Istook of Oklahoma, whose House subcommittee just happens to have jurisdiction over the Treasury Department.



The real question that rises out of this is whether so-called "principled" Republicans, like McCain, Grassley, and people like Lincoln Chaffee, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe are going to try to do something about it, or if they're going to continue to be good, obedient little brownshirts for the thugs who now run their party. Grandstanding with righteous indignation is one thing. Actually doing something is another. I'd like to believe that the thugs have crossed some sort of line and now the last sane Republicans in power will start to protest. However, if attacking your family, as they did with McCain in 2000, isn't enough, what is?



What's happening now is NOT "conservative." It's NOT about "less government." Allowing anyone in the government to view tax return information for any American, at any time, for any reason, is NOT conservative. It is totalitarian, it is the stuff of the former Soviet Union, and any principled conservative who buys into this ought to be ashamed of himself.