Boehner has also made a name for himself convincing corporate lobbyists to pay for lavish convention galas celebrating—who else?—himself. As USA Today reported in 2004, "the longest-running convention party is the one being thrown all four nights of the convention to honor Rep. John Boehner. . . . The party-every-night tradition goes back to the GOP's San Diego convention in 1996, where nightly bashes for Boehner—then a member of the House leadership—got a reputation as the best events in town." The newspaper reported that the shakedown operation was "led by Bruce Gates, a lobbyist for Washington Council Ernst & Young, a firm whose client list includes employers such as General Electric, Ford, AT&T and Verizon." According to the Congress-watching Washington tabloid The Hill, Gates now serves as the treasurer of Boehner's political action committee.

Between these twin corporate toadies, one might expect the race to replace DeLay to come down to which candidate is connected to indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and which one is not. There's just one problem—both Blunt and Boehner have extensive ties to him.

The nonpartisan Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) reported in September 2005 that "Blunt and his staff have close connections to überlobbyist Jack Abramoff," including Blunt's acceptance of campaign contributions linked to Abramoff at the same time that Blunt signed a letter supporting legislation to benefit Abramoff's clients. Likewise, the Cincinnati Post reported in early January that Boehner "received $32,500 in political contributions from Indian tribes represented by [Abramoff], placing him in the top tier of lawmakers who got donations from the lobbyist or his clients."

A WAR ON PRIVACY—Revelations about President Bush ordering a domestic spying operation widely deemed illegal [see the Washington Spectator, January 15, 2006] have once again highlighted that Americans' privacy rights are under an assault motivated by both partisan objectives and big money interests. The recent history is not pretty.

On the partisan side, Bush officials at the FBI and the Pentagon have been exposed for using "national security" as an excuse to spy on anti-war, anti-poverty and civil rights groups—aka President Bush's major political opponents. Likewise, the Bush Justice Department placed provisions in the Patriot Act that allow federal agents to search citizens' library and bookstore records without the traditionally required warrants—again, provisions that have lent themselves to partisan abuse. Facing criticism, the administration claimed in 2003 that those provisions had never been used, but the University of Illinois released a study showing that scores of libraries had in fact been contacted by the government with requests for records.

And the partisan assault on privacy has now apparently come to involve tax records. The Tacoma News Tribune recently reported that administration officials at the Internal Revenue Service "collected information on the political party affiliations of taxpayers in 20 states" under the guise of tax enforcement. This followed a move in late 2004 in which Republicans inserted a last-minute provision into an unrelated spending bill giving "staffers on the House and Senate appropriations committees broad access to Americans' tax returns," according to the Washington Post. In publicly exposing the provision, Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) laid out exactly what it would do: "Any agent of the chairman of the Appropriations Committee—and they could designate anybody as an agent—could go into IRS facilities anywhere in the country and get your tax returns," he said.

That is correct—Republicans were trying to give themselves the legal authority to obtain your private tax returns for any reason. Richard Nixon's spirit, wherever it was, surely smiled. He was the one who, in appointing a new IRS commissioner, famously said, "I want to be sure he is a ruthless son of a bitch, that he will do what he's told, that every income tax return I want to see, I see, that he will go after our enemies and not go after our friends."

The corporate assault on privacy is much more out in the open than the politically partisan one. Instead of employing shadowy tactics from deep within the federal bureaucracy or using stealth provisions in unrelated bills, corrupt politicians have very publicly sought to eliminate Americans' financial privacy at the request of their big-business donors.

The most brazen of these efforts came in November 2003. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that "in addition to previous votes that gutted state provisions to prevent financial institutions from sharing customers' information with others," Congress passed a bill to "roll back some of the [states'] anti-identity-theft measures." The bill, pushed by the credit-card and financial-services industries, essentially pre-empted states' financial privacy laws and replaced them with far weaker federal standards. That bill left open loopholes—for instance ones that have left private telephone records highly susceptible to theft. Today, you can pay $110 to a service called Locatecell.com, and get a list of the outgoing calls from any cell phone customer whose name, address and telephone number you know. Congress has known about these kinds of loopholes for months—and possibly years—but has refused to close them. Why? Because privacy safeguards get in the way of marketing schemes by corporations—corporations who buy off politicians.