From a New York Times editorial, 11/24/04:
http://nytimes.com/2004/11/24/opinion/24wed2.html

Snookering the Taxpayers

It is called a snooker clause in legislative parlance - a last-minute
insert into a dense and hurried midnight bill that, if ever disclosed
after passage, always leaves legislators shocked, shocked at how such
an undemocratic bit of mischief ever came to be.

"No earthly idea how that got in there," said Bill Frist, the Senate
majority leader, after the impenetrable, 14-inch-thick omnibus budget
bill turned out to have a provision giving Congressional chairmen and
staff members entree to Americans' tax returns without regard to
privacy protections.

This has been a sacrosanct area ever since the Watergate scandals.
Severe civil and criminal penalties were enacted after the Nixon
administration's rifling of private tax returns to build the "enemies
list" aimed at government harassment.

A sharp-eyed Democratic staff member spotted the terse paragraph
sitting like a toxic clam in the muck of the omnibus spending bill, a
3,000-page disgrace in its own right that capped months of Capitol
procrastination.

Once the provision was found, everyone felt compelled to denounce it.
Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican, growled that it
summoned "the dark days in our history when taxpayer information was
used against political enemies."

The Senate declared the clause void, forcing G.O.P. leaders in the
House, where the gambit originated, to sheepishly follow suit.

House leaders insisted there was never an intent to pry into
taxpayers' lives.

The goal, they said, was simply to establish better oversight of the
tax collection bureaucracy.

Really?

Then how come anyone bothering to read the bill (and that did not
include many members of Congress) could see what an outrageous license
it provided for the appropriations committees to look into tax offices
"and any tax returns or return information contained therein."

Embarrassed solons had to admit they had no idea what other dangerous
items might be in the bill.

Taxpayers can only hope someone keeps reading.

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Gotta watch those crooked Repugs like a hawk.

Harry