Senator Rand Paul has applied his right as a U.S. Senator to hold up the long negotiated treaty with Switzerland over accounts held in Swiss banks by U.S. citizens. This is a cynical act of simple pay back to the wealthy Tea Bag supporters and not the principled stand he pretends it to be. He argues that the treaty does not given U.S. citizens sufficient latitude to protest opening if their tax records by IRS officials and legal treatment if tax liabilities are uncovered. There is no question that criminal acts are detailed in bank records (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...) the only question is how, who and when access to authorities will be made. Anyone who still has Swiss accounts has had sufficient time to move their accounts, but what is really at stake is past criminal activity. It is like Al Capone complaining that his tax records are being used to indict him for selling liquor and avoiding tax at the same time. This is not an issue of privacy but of criminal behavior that Senator Paul is shielding by his office (http://www.bloomberg.com/...). Paul appears to want tax cheats to be able to sanitize their records ahead of time with the complicity of Swiss banking authorities, something that has been debated in Switzerland for over a decade and the Swiss have agreed not to allow this, and in agreements with other EU nations have uncovered such complicity and corrected it in recent years (http://www.bloomberg.com/...). Many of the people Senator Rand is protecting are drug lords and others who launder money through Swiss banks, including those involved in cross border prostitution, counterfeiters of money, bonds and other financial instruments and dealers in fake goods. He is a fellow traveler.