Tonight I'm thinking about the Affordable Care Act, which McCain piously invoked as an example of the kind of unseemly rushing and ramming through that he disapproved of when he voted down the recent health care bill. The ACA took about a year to pass, spent an extensive amount of time in committee, incorporated hundreds of amendments, and had fundamentally the same structure from the beginning of the process to the end. This bill was cobbled together in a matter of weeks and was substantially altered while the Senate was in session preparing to vote on it. The hypocrisy is mind-boggling.

"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it away from the fog of the controversy."

A comment about a bill that took almost a year to draft and which was passed under regular order. And now hypocrites who used that quote to attack Pelosi are supporting this abominable bill, which was passed without any kind of analysis and without even the slightest pretense that anyone voting for it had read it.

The legislative process is always a mess. No matter how much we pretend (in one direction, because double standards), no significant law passes without essentially indefensible actions "behind the scenes". We may feel that one bill is super-duper and the other one is terrible, but we shouldn't let that blind us to the inevitably shabby nature of the process. Likewise, selectively noticing that nature for the purpose of criticizing particular bills makes for unconvincing political argument.