Last October, ThinkProgress helped break the story about the secretive twice annual meetings convened by Koch Industries owners Charles and David Koch. The meetings — which have been attended by top bankers, oil industry executives, two Supreme Court justices, Republican leaders, conservative fundraisers, and hate talkers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck — have been forums for election-related coordination and political strategy. In addition to judges, “journalists” like Tim Carney, Stephen Moore, and Michael Barone have attended the meetings and received funding from the Koch donors. The next event is this weekend in Rancho Mirage, California.

Earlier today, the National Review reported that Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) will address the meeting on Republican legislative strategy. Notably, Cantor has taken an active role in Republican efforts to defund financial reform — specifically the new regulations designed to oversee the trillion-dollar derivatives market (Koch Industries speculates on a number of commodities using complex derivatives, and other Koch attendee members represent hedge funds and other financial industries opposed to new Dodd-Frank regulations). ThinkProgress has exclusively obtained further details about the Koch meeting this weekend:

– At last year’s Koch fundraiser, Charles Koch promised to match every dollar committed by attendees. He raised $30 million dollars at the Aspen meeting in 2010, and hopes to do better this year, again matching every dollar raised with one of his own.

– The Koch meeting this year expects a larger group of donors, with 40% of the attendees as first time participants.

– Several key Republican donors who have attended in the past will again be in Rancho Mirage this weekend. Billionaire Diane Hendricks, of the country’s largest roofing and window supply company, and Richard DeVos, founder of the “direct selling” business Amway and owner of the Orlando Magic basketball team, will be in attendance. According to documents obtained by ThinkProgress, DeVos gave $250,000 to FreedomWorks in 2009 as the group was organizing the very first anti-Obama Tea Party rallies.

– Several longtime Koch lobbyists will be giving presentations this weekend. Alan Cobb, a Koch Industries lobbyist who now helps run Koch’s front group Americans for Prosperity, will lead a discussion along with officials from the Koch-funded academic institute at George Mason University, “the Mercatus Center.” After Koch fronts helped elect President Bush, academics from Mercatus successfully recommended, according to the Wall Street Journal, the majority of the Bush administration’s deregulation policies, particularly on environmental issues. In addition, longtime Republican pundit and Koch lobbyist Nancy Pfotenhauer will be presenting. Pfotenhauer, who is currently working as a “Koch spokeswoman,” planted a hit-piece against the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer after her story about the Koch brothers last year.

– Officials from the neoconservative consulting firm Orion Strategies will give a presentation this weekend. Weekly Standard contributor and Orion Strategies vice president Michael Goldfarb will be there.

The Politico reported this morning that, at the Koch meeting in January of 2009, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) debated Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) over whether to support ideologically pure Republican candidates or “electable” moderates. According to a source familiar with the panel, DeMint won over the “establishment crowd” of wealthy donors with his argument to support far right candidates, presumably ones like Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), and Sharron Angle.

Notably, the strategy of bringing together wealthy business leaders to fund efforts to push both the country and the Republican Party to the far right was pioneered by Fred Koch, the founder of Koch Industries and the father of David and Charles Koch. Fred worked to recruit Barry Goldwater to run for president in 1960, paving the way for him to win the nomination in 1964, and was a founding financier of the John Birch Society.

One of the major strategies that Republicans have used to try to undermine support for the recently passed federal health care law is to claim that it made huge cuts to Medicare for America’s senior citizens. This claim is misleading, because the cuts were primarily made to Medicare Advantage, a Medicare program administered by private insurers which is far less efficient than traditional Medicare. It is also somewhat hypocritical, given the fact that Republicans have declared themselves steadfastly opposed to government health care programs yet portrayed themselves as defenders of the world’s largest single payer health care system.

Current GOP Conference Chairman Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) is one of those conservatives who blasted the health care law for cutting Medicare. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last month, Hensarling noted that the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission had few health care recommendations. He called this a “bow to the left and the White House, which cut Medicare by $500 billion to finance a corner of ObamaCare”:

Yet, incredibly, the Simpson-Bowles report has almost nothing to say about the runaway health-care entitlements. This is a bow to the left and the White House, which cut Medicare by $500 billion to finance a corner of ObamaCare and wants its signature achievement untouched. But this is like doing a Pentagon budget review and excluding Iraq and Afghanistan. Republicans ought to reject the report on those grounds alone.

Yet the National Journal reports this morning that none other than Hensarling is pushing for his fellow Republicans to support the privatization of Medicare and the moving of the eligibility age for the program from 65 to 69, which would involve enormous cuts:

PUSH TO PRIVATIZE. House GOP members are considering a measure to convert the government-backed Medicare program into a voucher system. The measure would be part of the House budget, which will be shaped next month. Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling of Texas said the he expects Republicans to support the provision, which would require Medicare to give seniors an allotment of money to buy private coverage starting in 2021. The eligibility age would also be raised, from 65 to 69.

Hensarling’s proposal appears to be along the lines of House Budget Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) “Roadmap For America’s Future Act,” which would involve the most dramatic cuts to Medicare the program has ever seen. Under the Ryan plan, “Medicare would be cut 76 percent below its projected size under current policies, according to the Congressional Budget Office. In other words, by 2080, the vouchers that would replace Medicare would receive one-quarter of the resources that Medicare would otherwise use.”

Needless to say, it is incredibly cynical for Hensarling — and any of the other Republicans who support the Ryan plan — to complain about cuts to Medicare Advantage under Obama’s health law while simultaneously backing a proposal that would essentially end the program as we know it and leave millions of seniors on their own to contend with the health insurance industry.

There’s three things Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) likes in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and “unconstitutional.” Indeed, Lee has recently claimed that federal child labor laws, FEMA, food stamps, the FDA, Medicaid, income assistance for the poor, and even Medicare and Social Security violate the Constitution. Yet Senate Republicans have inexplicably chosen to put Lee on the very Senate committee that has jurisdiction over constitutional questions and the judiciary:

[A]ides said two Republicans, Sens. John Thune, R-S.D. and Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., and one Democrat, Sen. Benjamin Cardin, D-Md., will take seats on the Finance Committee. Freshman Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, will join the Senate Judiciary Committee and freshman Sens. John Hoeven, R-N.D. and Roy Blunt, R-Mo., are expected to win two of several open Appropriations Committee seats.

Placing Mike Lee in charge of overseeing the Constitution is a bit like putting Dick Cheney in charge of hunting and gun safety, yet the Senate GOP was so eager to put this radical tenther on the Judiciary Committee that it waived a rule prohibiting both of a state’s senators from serving on Judiciary in order to ensure Lee’s membership. Bizarrely, this move exposes a very real divide between Senate Republicans and the President. While President Obama’s State of the Union Address specifically highlighted “child labor laws” as an example of the kind of “commonsense safeguards” that all Americans can embrace, the Senate GOP apparently sees no problem with Lee’s view that federal child labor laws cannot constitutionally exist.