Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius (Photo: Flickr/US Mission Geneva)

This week Congress will hold yet another hearing addressing a grievance from Catholic bishops, this time about a recent loss of federal funds.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a hearing on Thursday titled, “HHS and the Catholic Church: Examining the Politicization of Grants,” the committee’s schedule shows.

The hearing will discuss a decision made several weeks ago by a federal health agency to deny millions in federal funds for a charity run by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The funds were for the bishops’ relief program for victims of human trafficking. The group lost the money because it refused to refer victims for contraceptives or abortion services. Three other groups that provide a wider range of services to victims were awarded the grants instead.

The bishops have exercised their immense political power to garner congressional hearings on topics they take particular issue before. Earlier this month, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health met to discuss the federal government’s decision to require health insurers to cover birth control services without co-payments.

The debate that day centered on a provision that allows religious employers to opt out of the mandate, derided mostly by Catholic groups because they claim it is not broad enough. The bishops have led the charge in denouncing the decision.

The Washington Post reported that letters were sent to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius by “more than 30 Republican lawmakers,” arguing that the decision to defund the Catholic human trafficking relief program “was unfair to the Catholic group and might violate federal laws banning discrimination based on religion”:

Two of the letters are seeking internal HHS documents relating to the decision and one, sent Monday by Rep. Darrell Issa (Calif.), said his investigative committee may issue subpoenas if HHS doesn’t comply.

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Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the bishops conference, said Friday that she welcomed the letters from Congress. “The more we look at this, the more concerned we are about it,” she said. “It appears the grant process was manipulated.”

One letter to Sebelius, by Republican Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Roy Blunt (Mo.) and Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) and signed by 24 other senators, made a similar point. “The integrity and lawful administration of our federal grant process — particularly with respect to equal treatment of religious institutions — must not be compromised,” it said.

The Post previously reported that Health and Human Services officials have denied any anti-Catholic bias in their decision-making.

The bishops have become well known for using their political power to roll back important protections and legal rights, mostly in the realm of reproductive rights. The Huffington Post recently described the bishops as a “group of men with no real background in law or medicine, but blessed with a strong personal interest in women’s bodies, [that] have quietly influenced all of the major anti-abortion legislation over the past several years. “

Blunt’s “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act of 2011,” Senate Bill 1467, thus far has two co-sponsors, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), and it is an identical copy of a House bill that was introduced in March.

Five months before HHS ordered all Food and Drug Administration-approved forms of birth control to be offered to all insured women without a co-pay — a move that has become controversial, especially for anti-abortion rights advocates — Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb) introduced the “Respect for Rights of Conscience” bill, which anticipated HHS’s decision. One aspect in the Findings and Purposes section of both bills is:

PPACA [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] creates a new nationwide requirement for health plans to cover “essential health benefits” and “preventive services” (including a distinct set of “preventive services for women”), delegating to the Department of Health and Human Services the authority to provide a list of detailed services under each category, and imposes other new requirements with respect to the provision of health care services.

Fortenberry’s bill has 44 co-sponsors and hasn’t seen any congressional action since March 28, according to bill records documented by the Library of Congress.

This legislation is intended to amend the Affordable Care Act by adding a section titled “Respecting Rights of Conscience With Regard to Specific Items of Services,” which states that a health plan will not have failed to provide “the essential health benefits package” described in the health care law, if the reason to deny coverage of certain services is because one or more of the services “is contrary to the religious beliefs or moral convictions” of either the sponsor, issuer or entity offering the health care plan. That also applies to individuals, in the case of individual coverage, whose “religious beliefs or moral convictions” are in conflict with any services covered under the health care law.

Under the proposed legislation, health care providers will not be required “to provide, participate in, or refer for a specific item or service contrary to the provider’s religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

The day before Blunt introduced the Senate version of this bill, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), put out a press release criticizing the “new HHS ‘preventive services’ mandate requiring private health plans to cover female surgical sterilization and all drugs and devices approved by the FDA as contraceptives, including drugs which can attack a developing unborn child before and after implantation in the mother’s womb.” Declaring that the new ruling violates “conscience rights,” the USCCB called on Congress to pass the “Respect for Rights of Conscience” bill.

Despite the Institute of Medicine disputing claims that the FDA-approved contraceptive methods offered to be covered fully under the health care law cause abortions, statements such as USCCB’s have been perpetuated by influential policy groups such asAmericans United for Life and the Family Research Council.

This week on the FRC’s Washington Watch Daily Radio Commentary, FRC President Tony Perkins said:

Starting next August, fertility might as well be a disease–because that’s how the government will be treating it. This month, HHS ordered all health insurers to offer free birth control–regardless of anyone’s objections. Drugs like Ella and Plan B are part of the mandate, even though they can destroy a developing baby. Once the regulations go into effect, this “emergency contraception” will be considered basic medical care–and taxpayers who don’t agree will still have to pick up the tab.

Blunt’s bill has been read twice and referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions for review.

Ayotte, the former New Hampshire attorney general, is a staunch opponent of gay marriage, a climate change skeptic, gun rights advocate and strong supporter of Arizona’s SB 1070–as well as being a Jane Norton fan.

From the letter:

“Many of us believe that Jane Norton has a bright future and have encouraged her to run in the next U.S. Senate election in Colorado in 2014. But, to get prepared for that option, Jane needs to eliminate the campaign debt from her 2010 campaign.”

The fundraiser, in Washington, D.C., is May 10. Suggested contribution: $250.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) is pressing his Republican colleagues to put a moratorium on earmarks. (UPPA/ZUMApress.com)

With a fight brewing between Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Tea Party ringleader Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) over the practice of requesting earmarks in the Senate, most Republican Senators have been desperately hoping to avoid picking sides. But Tea Party groups, which are eagerly monitoring a closed-door Republican Party vote on the issue next Tuesday, have decided to make sitting on the sidelines that much more difficult.

[GOP1] “It might not ever be known, but if somebody won’t come out and say they’ll vote against earmarks, then we’ll be pretty sure we know they voted for allowing them,” said Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, a national network of Tea Party groups. “And if that’s what they’re going to do, then a lot will see themselves facing primary challenges.”

The added pressure leaves many Republican senators between a rock and a hard place in the lead-up to Tuesday’s vote. On the one hand, they don’t want to undermine McConnell’s leadership or appear hypocritical should they continue the routine practice of requesting earmarks in the next Senate session. But they risk finding themselves on the wrong side of the GOP’s anti-spending campaign and alienating Tea Party groups that have made earmarks an important symbol of all that’s wrong with Washington.

Between now and Tuesday, Republican senators must weigh the dangers of speaking out versus straying mum and then cast a decisive, albeit non-binding vote that activists are looking to as a first sign of the character of next year’s Senate Republican caucus.

Following last week’s elections, DeMint wasted no time in capitalizing on the anti-spending fervor in Washington — and the anti-earmarks platforms on which many Senate Republicans had run — to announce a new push for a vote to place a year-long moratorium on the practice of earmarking at the upcoming Republican Conference meeting among Republicans. The issue quickly drove a wedge between the Tea Party and McConnell, who pushed back against DeMint’s proposal on television and in private. Tea Party leaders like Meckler couldn’t believe it.

“I think McConnell’s a perfect example of what’s wrong with the GOP and has been wrong for a long time,” said Meckler. “Following the election, he has a chance to be a hero and he’s being a zero. It’s very clear that the vast majority of Americans are anti-earmark. He’s a classic example of the arrogance of the ruling class.”

DeMint released a letter indicating that he had gathered the signatures of ten fellow Republican senators, including six fresh faces — Marco Rubio (Fla.), Pat Toomey (Pa.), Rand Paul (Ky.), Mike Lee (Utah), Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) — many of whom had run on explicitly anti-earmark platforms.

But many Republican senators hoped to avoid declaring either way, buoyed by the prospect that Tuesday’s vote would remain anonymous. The last time Senate Republicans had voted on a moratorium to end earmarks was in March, when DeMint led an open vote of the full Senate, and while a majority of Republicans had voted for the measure then, they had the benefit of knowing that with most Democrats voting against it, it had little chance of passing.

“It got a majority of the Republican conference last time, but like Bob Dole once said, you never get in trouble for voting for something that fails or against something that passes,” said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that advocates for reforming the congressional earmark process.

The secret ballot in Tuesday’s vote appeared to make approval of DeMint’s resolution that much less likely. “If you have a closed-door vote, then certainly there are people who can talk one way and vote another or won’t worry about the pressure back home or whatever else,” Ellis said.

The news that Tea Party groups will consider silence on the issue an admission of guilt, however, has thrown GOP senators’ previous calculations into flux and brought increased pressure on them to reveal their intentions. DeMint’s office confirmed on Wednesday that two more senators — Richard Burr (R-N.C) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) — have signed on as cosponsors to his proposal and Sen. Bob Corker’s (R-Tenn.) office responded via email on Wednesday night to say that he, too, had signed the letter. Tea Party groups across the country, meanwhile, have rallied to DeMint’s cause.

“We support it because we would like for our elected officials to vote on the bills at hand and not attach other things to it that might cause them to vote for bad legislation,” said Phillip Dennis, who sits on the steering committee for the Dallas Tea Party. “Let them vote on each bill on its own merits.”

As for Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), who voted against DeMint’s proposed moratorium in March and has yet to signal a position on the upcoming vote, Dennis added that his group will be “very interested in what she’s doing.”

Indeed, Hutchison is considered among the most vulnerable of GOP incumbents who are being scrutinized and asked to take a stand. She, Richard Lugar (Ind.), Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Roger Wicker (Miss.) all voted against DeMint’s earmark moratorium in March, and all are facing re-election in 2012. All four offices have refused to reveal their positions this time around, but by doing so they risk incurring renewed calls by the Tea Party to run primary challenges against them in two years’ time.

“We’ll do what we always do,” said Meckler. “Our members will put immense pressure on every senator to vote against earmarks. This is a fundamental issue — it’s both substantive and symbolic. Will they vote against the politics of the past or are they still stuck in it? This is a vote that will never go away, like TARP. Tea Partiers have long memories. Politicians have always taken advantage of the fact that voters have short memories, but we’ll know, we’ll remember, and in 2012 when they have aggressive, well-funded primary challengers, they’ll know why.”

One Republican Senate office, which asked to remain anonymous, urged Tea Party groups not to make assumptions about the senator’s lack of public commitment at this time. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who is also up for re-election in 2012, will wait until talking with his colleagues next week before coming to a decision. The office of Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), who has also thus far declined to indicate how he will vote, did not return requests for comment.

Staying silent, however, no longer seems like the safest option.

In New Hampshire, for instance, seniors backed GOP Senate candidate Kelly Ayotte over her Democratic challenger by 33 points. In the narrow Illinois Senate contest, Republican Mark Kirk won older voters by 22 points. And In Delaware, they were the only age group to back tea party favorite Christine O’Donnell, by an 11-point margin.

“I’ve been saying since August 2009, that there was a tsunami — in this case a senior citizen tsunami — headed towards Capitol Hill,” said Jim Martin, chairman of the 60 Plus Association, a conservative campaign group targeted toward older voters. “That tsunami came ashore.”

The 60 Plus Association, it should be noted, played a key role, along with groups like American Crossroads, in drumming up fears among the elderly about the health care reform bill’s efforts to fight the rising cost of Medicare — a cause that Republicans had long championed but now found opportune to decry. Billing itself a conservative alternative to the AARP, the 60 Plus Association served in many ways as an extension of the American Crossroads-led network of shadow GOP organizations devoted to electing Republicans last election cycle. Carl Forti, a veteran Republican operative and the political director of American Crossroads, also handled the PR and media profile of the 60 Plus group, which spent nearly $6 million dollars in independent expenditures attacking House Democrats who voted for health care reform.

Combine the swing among seniors with the fact that young people largely stayed home from the polls last Tuesday, and the landslide seem less like a shift in the national opinion and more like the product of simple demographic mathematics. Here’s a voter turnout graph Matt Yglesias provided last week, which speaks to this point:

The two most closely watched races will be in Delaware and in New Hampshire. In Delaware, tea party Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell looked to be stumbling in her race against Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) before getting some important endorsements and even more important polling numbers this weekend. In New Hampshire, long time GOP favorite Kelly Ayotte is facing some heat from attorney Ovide Lamontagne, who snagged an endorsement from tea party celeb Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) last week.

The story for November is the same in both races: Castle and Ayotte look like easy favorites to win their respective Senate seats, while O’Donnell and Lamontagne would turn the races into toss ups, at best, pushing the Republicans that much further away  from capturing the Senate.

The primaries — which are also taking place in Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia — feature tea party candidates on the GOP primary ballot in New York and Wisconsin as well, prompting the Wall Street Journal to question whether the whole insurgent movement is working out so well for Republicans after all:

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, chairman of the GOP’s gubernatorial campaign committee, said the party will benefit from keeping the tea party within its ranks.

“It would have been far, far, far worse if tea party candidates had decided to run as independents,” he told reporters last week. “I hope they would continue in the next cycle to run as Republicans, and I believe they will, because I believe the evidence is clear that they got a fair shake. They were welcomed and they participated, and in some places won primaries.”

The tea party movement has clearly played a big role in generating the “enthusiasm gap” between Republicans and Democrats — one of the primary factors that pollsters have been pointing ominously towards when they make predictions about big Republican gains in the fall. But then there are the numerous times that the movement has propelled fringe candidates who might ultimately hurt their party’s chances to the forefront — candidates like today’s New York GOP gubernatorial hopeful Carl Paladino:

In New York, some Republicans give Carl Paladino, a real-estate millionaire, little chance of winning the governor’s race if he beats former Rep. Rick Lazio for the GOP nomination. Mr. Paladino’s self-funding campaign has gained attention for his denunciations of both political parties and for such proposals as using empty prisons to train welfare recipients and the unemployed in new job skills and “personal hygiene.”

“The concern is that Paladino, because of his past statements, will be characterized as being not ready to be governor,” said John Faso, the last Republican nominee for governor in New York. “If Republicans are sullied or embarrassed by a candidate at the top of the ticket, then you could adversely affect turnout.”

Doyle notes how the initial two groups, conservative Club for Growth and Democratic-leaning Commonsense Ten, have been joined by about half a dozen others — including the already notorious Rove and Gillespe 527 group, American Crossroads — in registering in the last few weeks as “independent expenditure committees” that will collect unlimited amounts of money for campaign spending. Disclosure reports show the Club for Growth has received a total of $75,000 from just two donors, for instance.

But not all these groups are planning on registering as PACs, and many continue to spend thousands, and sometimes millions of dollars on campaigns without listing any donors:

[T]he American Action Network filed an independent expenditure report with the FEC Aug. 5 indicating that it is spending nearly $435,000 for cable television and radio ads in the New Hampshire campaign for an open U.S. Senate seat. The report listed no donations funding this spending.

The ads in question target Senate candidate Rep. Paul Hodes (D-N.H.) for his stance on climate change legislation. They’re not the only ones the group has cut, though. Again, according to Doyle’s report:

The American Action Network has indicated on its website that it also sponsored ad campaigns focused on Senate races in Washington state and Florida; however, it filed no reports with the FEC on its spending in those states. The group indicated in press releases that it considered its efforts in these races to be “issue advocacy” not subject to any FEC reporting rules.

Wyoming, a Republican stronghold that has voted just once for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1952, has nonetheless had a popular Democratic governor, Dave Freudenthal, for the last two terms. His retirement — and the lack of a clear Democratic successor — make the seat quite likely to fall into Republican hands in the fall, however.

As for Palin, Chris Cillizza at The Fix notes that her endorsements are now following a rather familiar pattern:

[G]et behind a female candidate with a few weeks remaining in a crowded primary fight in hopes of using her conservative star power (and the media attention her endorsement creates) to catapult her chosen candidate to victory.

While it’s hard to credit a single endorsement with delivering a race for a candidate, it is clear that Palin’s support for former Hewlett Packard executive Carly Fiorina in the California Senate race, state Rep. Nikki Haley in the South Carolina governor’s contest and former Secretary of State Karen Handel in the Georgia governor’s race helped each of the women at the polls.

Sarah Palin has endorsed a remarkable number of women in Republican primaries this election cycle, but thanks the Washington Post’s nifty new Palin “Endorsement tracker,” I can say that she’s ultimately endorsed more men than women. The Post’s tables also indicate she’s been more traditionally conservative in her endorsement choices than one might imagine, spreading the love evenly among “Tea Party” and “establishment” candidates across the country.

Josh Kraushaar notices that Republicans have gotten the U.S. Senate candidates they wanted in New Hampshire and Illinois, where they “lacked a deep bench of viable recruits — and their political hopes were largely dependent on one specific candidate running.” This feeds this week’s meme that Republican candidate recruiting is taking off, and the party is looking at a comeback after two disastrous election cycles.

Two side notes. One, the story of the party’s Senate recruiting is the story of moderates being enticed to run in blue states. If Republicans perform well in 2010, they’ll add Mike Castle (Delaware), Mark Kirk (Illinois), Charlie Crist (Florida) and Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire) to the Senate. That would be a net gain of two seats, with two candidates who supported cap-and-trade legislation, one who supported the stimulus and one who was re-appointed by a Democratic governor. If the party scores an upset in California, it would be with Carly Fiorina, a pro-choice moderate who was silenced by the McCain campaign after angering social conservatives. who was thrown under the bus by the McCain campaign after a series of gaffes.

Second note: The White House failed to get Lisa Madigan to run in Illinois and Roy Cooper to run in North Carolina, but it got the candidates it wanted in Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio and New Hampshire. For all the attention paid to Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s (D-N.Y.) run in New York, the White House scared two potential candidates out of the field to help Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). Rep. Joe Sestak’s (D-Pa.) primary challenge in Pennsylvania doesn’t seem to be creating an opening for former Rep. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). It all seems like slightly less success than George W. Bush had in 2002 Senate race recruitments, but much more than Bill Clinton had in 1994 races. In other words, pretty average.