Remember when John Ashcroft put a drape over the bared breast of the “Spirit of Justice” statue at the Justice Department? The Republicans are now busy trying to cover their own political private parts after flashing a core part of their agenda – their war on women — at an inopportune time.

It’s a motley conservative crew that makes up the Misogynistic Army of the Right.

I noticed yesterday that Republicans ran away from further votes on the issue of birth control. It was pretty obvious that their position, which started as a paean to religious freedom but started to sound suspiciously like conservatives just didn’t believe in birth control – certainly not as a preventive health measure, was hurting them with the public. But we didn’t know how much until a new poll secured the data.

Remember the charge of the light brigade last week after the defeat on the Blunt amendment vote? Conservative lawmakers said they would not retreat, would not rest until all women had to get permission slips from their employers to access legal medical services? Flash forward to a week later and they’re not fighting on. In the Senate, Roy Blunt, author of the amendment giving employers a say over health care decisions, basically pronounced “mission accomplished” today.

Apparently, Lisa Murkowski was unprepared for the impact of her voting for the rule to have employers dictate the health care choices of half the nation’s population. Whatever religious freedom case conservatives wanted to make when putting the power of health care decisions in the hands of employers and taking them away from women has been thoroughly discredited. Murkowski almost certainly knew that at the time – she admitted in an interview that the language was “overbroad” – and still voted for it.

Democrats have descended on Rush Limbaugh’s comments about Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who testified to the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee on the Administration’s birth control access rules for religiously affiliated institutions. Limbaugh has spent the past two days alleging that Fluke must be a prostitute if she advocates birth control, mocking her testimony and upping the rhetoric with each passing day.

Democratic groups have countered.

Like all middle-aged men, Senate Republicans imagine themselves experts on women’s health, and they plan to continue to fight to eliminate free preventive women’s health services like birth control, even after yesterday’s Blunt amendment vote narrowly failed.

The Senate voted to table the Blunt amendment today, but several Democrats crossed the aisle to vote with Republicans and for an amendment that would give employers effective control over the medical procedures their employees could access.

Harry Reid has scheduled a vote on the Blunt amendment, which would allow employers to refuse insurance mandates on virtually any medical service simply by stating a moral objection to the practice, for tomorrow. Reid actually introduced the amendment himself when the Republicans wouldn’t.

We’re going to have that rare moment this week in Congress, a vote which both sides anticipate with a certain glee. The transportation bill is on the floor of the Senate this week, and Democrats can’t wait to have their rivals initiate a vote on the Blunt amendment, which responds to the President’s birth control universal access rules by allowing any employer to opt out of any health insurance mandate on religious grounds.

Probably the most convenient thing about turning one’s political party into a something closer to a religion, as the Republicans have increasingly done, is that your adherents can be relied upon to believe anything you say, no matter how implausible, provably false, or downright cuckoo it happens to be. When you’re talking about a religion, after all, the more improbable the belief is, the more fervently it is held, and for Republicans this tendency is always a bonus, for good reason.