Senator Stevens weakest link or sacrificial lamb?

Senator Stevens is guilty of one of two things. Either he is the single most idiotic politician on Capitol Hill right now, or he is offering himself up as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of porkbusting to get the public riled up about fraud, waste and abuse:

Aaron Saunders, spokesperson for Stevens, said Coburn was informed two weeks ago that his boss had concerns about the bill. Namely, Stevens is concerned that the bill would create more bureaucracy. He wants to see a cost-benefit analysis.

Saunders said there was nothing secret about what Stevens did.

"Senator Stevens has always preferred to handle this at the staff level or member to member," Saunders said. "He doesn't like running to the blogosphere or the media."

So where was the good Senator back when the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, the bill that created the enormous and infamously inefficient Transportation Security Administration (TSA)? Oh, right, he had absolutely no problem creating a vast new bureaucracy that added tens of thousands of new workers to the federal payroll. I'm sure that he's just concerned that this obvious mistake of his will only be compounded by adding a few dozen software engineers, managers and database administrators to the federal payrolls to keep track of how much agencies like the TSA, which he helped create, are spending. Truly, this "new bureaucracy" would end up being the straw that breaks the camel (*ahem*... taxpayer's) back.

I don't think that this is going to be enough to get him booted from the Senate, but it might be enough to at least cost some Republicans who have been close to him, some very much needed votes in 2006. You know what they say, you lie with dogs, you'll get fleas...

Now that he has been exposed, the Senate needs to break with its traditions and move on. The Senate is not a religious body; its traditions shouldn't mean jack when there is something of obvious constitutional need that is being held up for petty reasons. Create the database, let everyone search through it, then let the reign of terror of arrests and prosecutions for bribes and other criminality in the elected government commence.