Chip Taylor

A downside to one-party rule

James Edward Maule has comments on the recent congressional mishap in which appropriations chairs were to be given access to individual tax returns without restrictions penalizing misuse or abuse.

Was it a mistake? Some members of Congress think not. They think it was deliberate. I think they're right. That's not to say I disbelieve the chairs of the two Appropriations Committees. I think that because of how Congress does business, someone very easily could have slipped the provision into the legislation without either one of them knowing it.

If "mistake" means "something that should not have been done" then, yes, this was a mistake. Accidents are mistakes. But if "mistake" means "it wasn't deliberate" then this incident was NOT a mistake. It's one thing to have something fall out of the legislative text. Or to have a page disappear (which almost always generates truly incoherent language). Or to have a typographical reversal of two numbers, or to use the wrong punctuation. Or to let an earlier version of a proposed statutory section supplant its replacement. But it's a totally different thing for a tax-related provision, an administrative provision, a provision having nothing to do with appropriations, to appear whole-cloth in a spending bill. One minute, not there, the next minute it's there.

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The good news is that this incident was detected, and thwarted. The bad news is that the persons responsible may go unidentified, or if unidentified, unpunished. The even worse news is that there is no guarantee that it won't happen again. And that's just flat out outrageous.

Win a few elections and you think you can get away with any darn thing.