At 1:30 p.m. today, in Room 226 of the Dirksen Building, Senator Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., will hold a hearing on the “History and Legality of Executive Branch Czars.” Since Feingold is a liberal Democrat, this raises eyebrows. Why would Feingold embrace a topic–so often distorted and misunderstood–that has been the purview of Fox News and sundry other detractors of President Obama?

The answer may be as simple as: Feingold believes we are better than all that. To explain what I mean, allow me to excerpt from Michelle Cottle’s compelling take down of the conservative scaremonger Betsy McCaughey in The New Republic.

In the piece, Cottle quotes Stuart Butler, the vice president of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, saying this about McCaughey’s misleading attack on Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, a White House adviser whom I have also written about: “Personal attacks on good people like Zeke are outrageous. There are real policy issues that should be debated vigorously, but slandering a good person’s name is beyond the pale.”

What Butler is pleading for here is not an end to debate, but a return to a more basic standard of fair play. The idea that we can talk about improving the health care system by re-aligning incentives, and even thinking reasonably about how to distribute scarce resources like donated organs, without effectively accusing each other, as McCaughey does, of murderous intent.

In the same way, the debate over “czars” has come to resemble not a reasoned discussion but a knife fight in a back alley.