Ready for Second-Term Skullduggery??

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Negotiators Add Abortion Clause to Spending Bill. The language buried deep inside the new piece of legislation expands various protections to doctors and healthcare institutions which refuse to give patients access to abortion counselling or abortion procedures.

Senate majority leader Frist, interviewed today, gave lip service to being outraged someone had slipped this into the omnibus spending package, but pleaded ignorance about who could have made the edit. Given the way legislators approach their jobs, it could very well have gone unnoticed until the bill is passed. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D.-Cal.) vowed to use ‘procedural tactics’ to slow Senate business to a crawl if the clause was not removed from the bill.

And:

Lest you think this was an isolated transgression of legislative ethics, there’s this:

“Representative Ernest Istook, the chairman of the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Internal Revenue Service budget, said on Monday that a measure allowing some lawmakers and their staffs to examine Americans’ income tax returns had been inserted in a huge spending bill by a staff assistant without his knowledge.” (New York Times)

Josh Marshall is all over the story of who’s trying to pull the wool over our eyes on this one.