Dangers of the do-nothing (do-damage) Congress

Rolling Stone magazine of all places has a hard-hitting expose of the current, GOP-strangled Congress, "The Worst Congress Ever"(h/t Unclaimed Territory). One does not need the Iraq mess to justify throwing the bums out come Tuesday.

The series of horror stories is almost unimaginable. My favorite, so far:

A few years ago, when Democratic staffers in the Senate were frantically poring over a massive Omnibus bill they had been handed the night before the scheduled vote, they discovered a tiny provision that had not been in any of the previous versions. The item would have given senators on the Appropriations Committee access to the private records of any taxpayer -- essentially endowing a few selected hacks in the Senate with the license to snoop into the private financial information of all Americans.
"We were like, 'What the hell is this?'" says one Democratic aide familiar with the incident. "It was the most egregious thing imaginable. It was just lucky we caught them."

The bit about being handed a huge bill with no notice is the typical part. Access by Senate staffers to citizens' tax records (and that perhaps a little known secret) is the chilling part. It certainly underscores suspicions that so-called domestic intelligence gathering is not primarily aimed at "terrorist" enemies. Nixon would have loved it.