Notwithstanding the fact that I voted twice for Charles McC. Mathias Jr., the Maryland Republican elected three times to the Senate, my right-wing detractors often complain that I can’t find anything redeeming about the GOP. That’s bunkum.

Even before I cast a ballot for Mathias, I championed Richard Nixon’s Philadelphia Plan. That policy crafted by the Republican president back in 1969 sought to overcome racial discrimination in employment by requiring federal contractors to set specific goals for hiring minorities.

Hey, don’t yell at me. That was Nixon’s idea.

I know a lot of my critics will say the statute of limitations has run out on those bipartisan acts, so I have something much more recent to offer them. While channel hopping through the networks’ Sunday morning talk shows, I realized that much of what Republicans were saying that day sounded perfectly reasonable.

To begin with, there was Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” talking about the Justice Department’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys. When the two-term GOP senator was asked for his take on allegations the prosecutors were removed for political reasons, he said what I was thinking.

“This needs to be addressed, and I think the president makes a big mistake if he tries to make this a constitutional issue and make it a separation of power issue,” he said.

Well, I couldn’t agree more.

Then there was Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on “Face the Nation.” He also was being questioned about the firings and the role Attorney General Alberto Gonzales might have had in them.

“We need to find out exactly what did happen, because the attorney general said, I think in the USA TODAY article in March, that they were fired because of performance reasons, that he had evaluated their status and they just didn’t perform well,” Graham said. “He’s also said that he delegated this to underlings, and he really wasn’t involved. The attorney general has been wounded because of his performance, not because of politics.”

Now that’s a Republican position I can embrace.

So is this: “I think the president is wrong when he refuses to have a transcript,” Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Arlen Specter said on “Meet the Press.” He was talking about President Bush’s refusal to allow a transcript to be made of anything White House aides might tell the Senate Judiciary Committee about their role in the dismissals.

The impasse over a transcript and whether the president’s staffers would have to testify in public under oath threatens a constitutional showdown between Congress and the White House.

“If you don’t have a transcript,” Specter said, “senators are going to walk out and, in good faith, have different versions as to – as to what occurred.”

Now that’s just Common Sense 101.

H.L. Mencken once said, “Our basic trouble in the United States is that nearly all our public discussion is carried on in terms of humbug, and by professional hypocrites.”

That’s a fitting description of those in politics who find nothing acceptable about their ideological opposites.