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So now the Target CFO gets to explain himself to the grandees and solons in Washington:

Target Corp.’s chief financial officer heads to Capitol Hill Tuesday to face congressional questions for the first time about one of the largest computer data breaches in U.S. history.

CFO John Mulligan will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, along with federal officials charged with protecting consumer information. Mulligan returns to the witness stand Wednesday before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Lawmakers are expected to grill Mulligan on the details of how hackers gained access to the payments data or personal information of up to 110 million Target customers late last year. The vast data breach at the retail giant remains under investigation by the Secret Service, the Department of Justice and a forensics team. State attorneys general have joined to conduct their own probe of the theft.

After all, when it's time to investigate IT issues, who better to sift through the evidence than the architects of Obamacare?

Democrats on the House ­committee have pushed ­Target to provide detailed information about its computer security system as well as its discovery of the breach in mid-December.

“Security experts have found that the hackers may have been able to break into systems at Target and other stores as a result of weak passwords on point-of-sale systems,” Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., wrote to Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel in late January.

Henry Waxman? Ol' Henry is finally retiring from Congress after 40 years there. He hasn't spent even a day in the private sector in that time, but he's spent a lifetime pestering business people. He's hauled countless people into his star chamber to explain themselves and rarely has it made any difference in the products or services they produce, nor the corporate governance that these people operate under. And Waxman was one of the key people driving Obamacare, so you know he's fantastic at IT issues.

Two fearless predictions:

• We won't learn anything new from the hearings
• Henry Waxman will have nothing constructive to say, but he'll do some kick-ass grandstanding

Here's a Waxman quote:

"There are elements of Congress today that I do not like. I abhor the extremism of the Tea Party Republicans," Waxman said in a statement. " I am embarrassed that the greatest legislative body in the world too often operates in a partisan intellectual vacuum, denying science, refusing to listen to experts, and ignoring facts."

Physician, heal thyself.