Priorities of the newly-ratified mandarins

What's the first thing the Republicans want to do post-election? Buy back the presidential yacht, of course!


USS Sequoia: "When President Carter announced that Sequoia would be sold, crew members said they were devastated. 'We cried, it was as though a member of the family died.'"

The taxpayers will be asked to cough up $2 million to buy the USS Sequoia in the spending bill now before the lame-duck Congress. However the current owners say this symbol of wealth and privilege is "not for sale".

Taxpayer privacy under attack
Not only do the Republicans want to spend on luxury, they want to give their staffers the right to pour over our tax returns. Here is an exchange from Meet the Press this morning between Tim Russert and Senator John McCain:

MR. RUSSERT: In the House version of this spending bill, there was a provision which said that the Appropriations Committee should have access to taxpayers' tax returns. How did that happen?

SEN. McCAIN: What happens here is that they slap these omnibus bills together--as you mentioned, this one's nine bills that we should have passed separately--nobody sees them or reads them. It was a 1,630- page document yesterday that was presented to us sometime in the morning, and we voted on it in the evening. The system is broken, and everybody, of course, wanted to get out of town, understandably.

MR. RUSSERT: Why should Congress have access to citizens' tax returns?

SEN. McCAIN: According to--Senator Stevens' explanation on the floor last night was that two staffers put in this provision and no one knew about it until another Senator Conrad staffer discovered it.

MR. RUSSERT: What was their motive?

SEN. McCAIN: That should--you know, I don't know. I can't imagine. But the fact that our system is such that that would ever be inserted and passed by the House of Representatives--if there's ever a graphic example of the broken system that we now have, that certainly has to be it.

Gee, nobody now knows how or why this could've happened. Unnamed "staffers" are to blame. It'll require a separate measure to delete it, which Senator Frist promised to "take care" of.

Update: More on tax return privacy here.

Intelligence Bill
This is in some ways an enjoyable spectacle. The 911 reforms, being shepherded by Maine's puppy-dog Senator Susan Collins, can't be passed because of a deep anti-immigration split on Bush's right side. Seems the "moderate" Republicans are quite in favor of illegal immigrants having the legal right to a driver's license.