With the departure of Tom DeLay and his jailed associates, Congressional Republicans have become the guardians of fair legislative process, or so they would have you believe. Take just about any issue where they have an unpopular stance, and it's almost guaranteed that they will finger-wag and bray about "playing politics" and so on. Sometimes they have a point. The House SCHIP vote that got squeezed in at the last minute last week turned out to be mistake. And it's genuinely a good thing that conservatives pressed for earmark reform. But it can't be about process all the time. Every now and then, votes are about, you know, the policy. Rarely will you hear that conservatives do not place a high enough priority on funding cancer research, Head Start, and veteran's health care at Walter Reed to vote for the Labor-HHS/VA appropriations bill. And rarely will you hear that they would like to keep taxes selectively low on hedge fund managers and CEOs, while letting taxes increase on the upper middle class- the goals of the AMT patch package. But this is what they'll be voting for. Ditto for denying 4 million children of health care coverage, which of course is not what they intend to do when they uphold President Bush's veto of SCHIP. And when war spending comes up, neither will they say that they would prefer to continue the war in Iraq for another year, thank you very much. Opponents of progress will always hide behind the troops and trumped-up process concerns, but hopefully they'll continue to be met on policy grounds, where liberals are strongest.