There's always a defense. You just have to be clever enough to think of it.
I'm not going to defend these guys over this, to be sure. The bill sounds pretty mediocre at the very best, the unilateral decision making is lousy (though they largely learned it from the days of the Democratic majority, unfortunately), and I mostly hate these guys.
But I predict that one defense will be along the lines of "oh, the bill is almost entirely made up of lots of boilerplate language from past bills that have been floating around for years, and everyone knows the language, and we've put out what we've been going to do for a while, so protesting at the last minute is just an exaggerated complaint. Besides, we're just doing what you Democrats used to do to us for decades."
Then there's always the "Look! Halley's Comet!" defense.
Hey, the boilerplate response is pretty clever. I'll look for it.
Incidentally, feel free to post something about this.
Gary, I emailed you at the aol account. If you see this but not that, leave a comment here.