Brain Fertilizer

The thing that bothers me most about this underhanded and sneaky attempt to violate reasonable privacy standards is that it will be blamed on Republicans as somehow revealing the 'true nature' of the GOP...despite the fact that it seems as if it was Rebublicans who found it and stopped it, Republicans who are issuing the strongest denouncements, Republicans who are vowing punishment for the people involved, and Republicans who are speaking out about how the system that allowed this sort of crap to happen is broken and needs to be fixed.
Heck, this sort of "The Government has more rights than you do" crap is far more typical of Democrats in the first place. But even The Ace of Spades seems willing to tar all Republicans with the brush of blame.

More:

...the language had actually been drafted by the Internal Revenue Service and that "nobody's privacy was ever jeopardized." [...]

John D. Scofield, the spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee, said that the purpose of the provision was to allow investigators for the top lawmakers responsible for financing the I.R.S. to have access to that agency's offices around the country and tax records so they could examine how the money was being spent. There was never any desire to look at anyone's tax returns, he said.

Mr. Scofield said the only purpose of the provision was to allow investigators to have access to revenue service offices. He said the authority would be similar to that allowed senior members and staff assistants of the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee, the panels with primary jurisdiction over the activities of the revenue service.

I'm not sure how plausible that explanation is. We'll see how the investigation sorts out. If they are truthful and accurate in their explanation (a problematic question with politicians, to be sure), then it sounds like they were trying to correct a problem in a clumsy fashion using wording that "allowed" more than it "required". That should be easy to determine.

This makes one interesting point more clear: I guess one of the differences between Democrat and Republican voters is that Democrat voters tend to trust their elected officials without suspicion and assume Republican officials are the spawn of Satan; whereas Republican voters seem to assume that the whole bunch is a pit of vipers that needs to be watched closely, except some of the snakes are trainable enough to be useful at times.