Pointing out the hypocrisy of Republican positions on procedural fairness is getting tiresome, I know. But I can't let this one pass.

From Jay Newton-Small at Time:

WASHINGTON -- In a city where the phrase “bipartisan initiative” is becoming an oxymoron, the urgency of containing the damage the Supreme Court could do to our electoral system creates an opportunity for a rare convergence of interest and principle.

At issue is the court’s astonishingly naive decision in January that allows unlimited corporate spending to influence elections. Its 5-4 ruling in the Citizens United case was a shocking instance of judicial overreach and reflected an utter indifference to how politics actually works.

WASHINGTON -- The word "partisanship" is typically accompanied by the word "mindless." That's not simply insulting to partisans; it's also untrue.

If we learn nothing else in 2010, can we please finally acknowledge that our partisan divisions are about authentic principles that lead to very different approaches to governing?

The White House has released some more details about Thursday's Blair House meeting: Who will be there and the shape of the table where they'll all be sitting:

The President will be seated in the middle of one side of the hollow square, with the Vice President, Secretary Sebelius, and congressional Leadership seated alongside him. Members will be seated by caucus around the square.

Remember those days of yore, when John McCain was a man who put principle over partisan politics, somebody who could be counted upon to speak the truth?

John McCain doesn't.

Yesterday, McCain began the Republican assault on health care reform by proposing to strip the Senate bill of its proposed $487 billion in Medicare reductions. The "unspecified" reductions, McCain said, would "directly impact the health care of citizens in this country":

All of these are cuts in the obligations that we have assumed and are the rightful benefits that people have earned... I will eagerly look forward to hearing from teh authors of this legislation as to how they can possibly achieve half a trillion dollars in cuts without impacting existing Medicare programs negatively and eventually lead to rationing of health care in this country.

It's a bit rich for McCain to make this argument, given that it was just a little more than a year ago McCain himself, as a presidential candidate, was calling for substantially larger Medicare cuts. As Igor Volsky explains over at Wonk Room:

In October 2008, the McCain campaign announced that the Senator would pay for his health plan “with major reductions to Medicare and Medicaid…in a move that independent analysts estimate could result in cuts of $1.3 trillion over 10 years to the government programs.” Those cuts would have reduced Medicare and Medicaid spending by as much as 20% over 10 years and cut into benefits.

McCain has plenty of company in his hypocrisy. As Volsky goes on to note, many of the Republicans likely to vote in favor of McCain's amendment voted for the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, whichalso called for substantial Medicare cuts. Sam Brownback, Charles Grassley, Jon Kyl... the list goes on.

Of course, there were some critical differences between the Medicare reductions Republicans backed during the 1990s and the ones Democrats propose today. But those differences don't exactly put the Republican attacks in a more favorable light.

On the first day of the Senate Finance Committee's hearings on health care reform, Senator Jon Kyl, a fiery free-market fundamentalist, assailed reform as a "stunning assault on liberty." By day two, he had turned to the more prosaic task of reversing the bill's cuts in the Medicare budget. The elderly, Kyl fretted, "have reason to be worried that portions of this bill could affect their care." Note that neither health care experts nor even the AARP believes the cuts would hurt senior citizens.

We now have video of today's exchange between Senators Jon Kyl and Debbie Stabenow over requiring that insurance policies cover specific benefits--in this case, maternity benefits. It's worth considering Kyl's quote in full:

I don't need maternity care and so requiring that to be in my insurance policy is something i don't need and make the insurance more expensive.

Kyl's statement is absolutely true. He doesn't need maternity care and never will. If we require that all insurance policies cover maternity care, then the insurance he buys will be a little more expensive.

Kyl's view, widely shared by members of his party and fellow conservatives, is that making him pay that extra sum would be wrong. It reduces his ability to make choices and forces him to bear costs that are not his responsibility.

Via Wonkroom comes this back-and-forth at the Senate Finance hearings, between Jon Kyl, the Arizona Republican, and Debbie Stabenow, the Michigan Democrat. The subject is requirements that all insurance policies cover certain benefits. 

KYL: "I don't need maternity care."

This time as defined by Jon Kyl, who told reporters today that the co-op plan (which Kent Conrad came up with as a compromise to the public plan) is also a non-starter for Republicans:

For the past few weeks, we've heard a lot of debate about whether constitutional law can possibly survive close contact with the concept of empathy. But after spending the afternoon at the Sotomayor hearings, listening to senators left and right prattle about empathy and its relationship to justice, I have another question: Can the concept of empathy survive close contact with constitutional law?

In 2007, John Bolton wrote that Republicans had achieved "the end of arms control." He was referring to a string of conservative successes, sta

The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression By Amity Shlaes (HarperCollins, 464 pp., $26.95)

Herbert Hoover By William E. Leuchtenburg (Times Books, 208 pp., $22)

Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America By Adam Cohen (Penguin Press, 372 pp., $29.95)

In Washington today, many blame America's terrorism problem on Saudi Arabia. In an August 2003 Washington Post op-ed, for instance, Senators Jon Kyl and Charles E. Schumer accused Riyadh of continuing to deceive the United States, "acting as our ally [while] supporting a movement--Wahhabism--that seeks our society's destruction."