GOP Misses Matlock, Grumbles.

The Dems' middle of the night health care vote has, no surprise, angered Republicans. Putz smells conspiracy, the wingnut leadership is tearing up memeorandum, and the GOP leadership is appalled:

"Make no mistake," said Minority Leader Mitch McConnell a few minutes before the vote. "If the people who wrote this bill were proud of it, they wouldn't be forcing this vote in the dead of night." Referring to the Nelson buy-off and other special arrangements in the bill, McConnell said few people would have imagined that the health care debate would have ended "with a couple of cheap deals and a rushed vote at one o'clock in the morning."

Hmmmmm. Fuck you.

WASHINGTON, March 20 - The Senate approved legislation on Sunday that would allow a federal court to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo, and House Republican leaders spearheaded an extraordinary Sunday night session to speed the measure to President Bush, who rushed back to Washington from his Texas ranch.

"Every hour is incredibly important to Terri Schiavo," said Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority leader, who led the effort to inject Congress into the long-running legal battle over Ms. Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged Florida woman whose feeding tube was disconnected on Friday afternoon at the direction of a state court. ...

The Democrats' refusal to allow the bill to pass without a roll-call vote prevented the House from taking up the measure early Sunday afternoon and sent Republican leaders scurrying to summon lawmakers scattered for the Easter recess back to Washington to provide a quorum.

House rules required that such a vote could not occur until Monday, so the Republican leaders suspended the vote until 12:01 a.m. so they would have time to assemble at least 218 of the 435 House members.

Just so we're clear on where the GOP priorities lay: late-night vote to maintain the illusion that a single person with irreversible brain damage in a persistent vegetative state was alive -- good.  Late-night vote to cover more than 30 million people with health care -- bad.

If we're lucky, this should be the end of President Obama's little experiment in bipartisanship. One cannot negotiate with people for whom bad faith is a way of life.