Holliday was not alone. Having traveled into the city from the suburbs for the 10 a.m. “Code Red” rally on the Capitol grounds, she got more and more annoyed that she couldn’t hear any of the speakers. (She was also annoyed at the wrong Tea Party activist — the Code Red rally was sponsored by a coalition of Tea Party groups, while a different, 9 a.m. rally had been organized by Armey’s FreedomWorks.) As Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) waved a copy the massive Senate version health care bill — “I brought an abortion to show you!” — Holliday winced and chanted her disapproval.

“Kill the bill!” she said. “Kill the bill! And get us a PA system!”

Demonstrators at Tuesday's rally on Capitol Hill (Photo by David Weigel)

If the relative fizzle fazed Tea Party organizers — FreedomWorks had hoped for closer to 2500 activists — they didn’t show it. Rob Jordan of FreedomWorks told smug Democrats to wait for election day: “You can count on people showing up.” Libertarian and conservative blogs reported on larger Tea Party protests happening in Michigan and San Diego.

But the smallish numbers of the March 16 Tea Party push amplified the new attitude coming from politicians and activists: pessimism. Slightly over a year since the start of the movement, Tea Party activists were, for the first time, contemplating a major legislative victory for President Barack Obama and the Democrats — the final passage of health care reform. While many held out hope that plans to pass the Senate’s version of reform in the House would stall out, others pondered their next steps. Some, like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), took a dark view of what might come.

“Right now, they’re civil, because they think they have a chance of stopping this bill,” said King to reporters, waving his arm at a pack of “People’s Surge” activists forming a line to enter the Cannon House Office Building. “The reason we don’t have violence in this country like they do in dictatorships is because we have votes, and our leaders listen to their constituents. Now we’re in a situation where the leaders are defying the people!” Later, King would expand on those remarks and speculate on a possible anti-Washington revolt in which Tea Parties would “fill the streets” of the capital.

Few Tea Party activists were as pessimistic as King. All agreed that the determination of Democrats to pass a bill — post-September 12, post-Massachusetts special election — was getting harder to overcome.

“Nothing they do surprises me!” said an exasperated Amy Kremer of Tea Party Express. “Nancy Pelosi has said, ‘If we can’t get through the fence, we’ll go over it; if we can’t go over the fence, we’ll catapult over it; if we can’t catapult over it, we’ll parachute over it.’ So, basically, they’ll do whatever it takes. Just a total disregard for what the American people want.”

Activists spent the day — they plan on spending most of this month — trying to convey just what it is they say Americans want. Those who arrived at the Hill on Tuesday morning were handed thick packets of advice on how to lobby members, and who needed their attention. Those who couldn’t make it there could pick up other guidelines at a small “war room” set up at a hotel a few blocks south of the Capitol. In all cases, activists were given advice on how to complement the phone calls and faxes that were coming to targeted representatives from, largely, Americans who didn’t live in their districts. A white sketchpad in the war room ran down a few possible responses to members who blanched at talking to the activists.

“If you are not a constituent and they don’t want to talk to you,” advised war room organizers, “ask — ‘If you won’t talk to someone from outside of your district are you ready or willing to pledge not to take money from donors outside of your district?’ Or — ‘If I gave you a donation, would you talk to me?’”

The lobbying had mixed results. A group of activists from Georgia told TWI that they were trying to lobby Rep. John Barrow (D-Ga.), who has said he’d vote “no” on the Senate bill, after a difficult time lobbying Rep. Sanford Bishop (D-Ga.), who has said he’d vote yes.

“We spent an hour with him,” grimaced Kathryn Jackson, a retired hospital worker from Fortson, Ga. She pointed to a lamppost. “It was about as useful as talking to that, right there.”

Kathy Ropte — like Jackson, a member of the Harris County, Ga. Tea Party, had started to move beyond lobbying. As cameras snapped away, she stood in front of the Cannon Building and announced the termination, “to take effect in November,” of pro-health care reform members. One activist chided her for the display, which included a massive sign reading “Waterboard Congress.” Jackson didn’t care. She was in the fight, whether or not health care reform passed.

“One day I turned off American Idol,” Ropte told TWI, “and I turned on Fox News. Before this year I’d never voted in my life.”

Of the activists who spoke to TWI, none were ready to give up on opposing health care reform if the bill passed. Some, however, were looking to other potential fights. Jane, a Montgomery County, Md. activist who declined to give her last name (”my kids don’t want to see it show up in the paper!”) suggested that a health care win would free up President Obama to give amnesty to undocumented immigrants, possibly by an executive order. Susan Clark, whose sign compared the health care bill to the notorious Tuskegee Experiment, suggested that passage would bring Democrats a step closer to enforcing a new “slavery” over Americans. But most activists who pondered the aftermath of health care reform’s passage said they would fight on, looking for ways to roll it back. Susan Birch, a Chester County, Penn. activist, sported a button for insurgent Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Sam Rohrer because he was pledging to make the governor’s office “the front line” against government expansion.

“Whatever Congress does,” said Birch, “you’re going to see the 10th Amendment invoked to stop it.”

The thought of a post-vote backlash — electoral and legal — was the cheeriest thought of the day.

“I’ve got a standing bet with [Rep.] Jason Altmire [D-Penn.],” said Henry Hill, a retired police officer and member of the Pittsburgh Tea Party. “A case of Yuengling says that the mandate will not go through the Supreme Court.”

Anti-abortion protesters in front of the U.S. Capitol (Flickr: John Stephen Dwyer)

“It was not 40 votes that we were trying to get with this amendment,” Clyburn said in an interview with MSNBC. “It was 10 votes. And that’s the fact.”

Republicans and anti-abortion rights activists weren’t buying it. Clyburn’s after-the-fact spin was incorrect; Democrats could have passed the bill without courting the anti-abortion rights members of their conference who wanted Stupak’s amendment. By letting it pass, a decision intended to give some temporary cover to vulnerable incumbents ended up opening a rift in their party.

In interviews with TWI, Republicans and activists explained their theory behind a contentious–and in the end, rewarding–heat-of-the-moment decision to back an amendment to a bill that all of them want to see go down in flames. The move to back Stupak’s amendment came after lobbying from a bevy of anti-abortion rights groups, including–perhaps most importantly–the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. And while some conservatives are still critical of the party for not killing the amendment and trying to sink the bill with it, most are coming around to the view that the alliance with conservative Democrats had, in the words of one long-time conservative activist, “dropped a bomb” in the Democratic conference.

“If defeating Stupak wouldn’t [have changed] the outcome on Saturday,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), “then it is clearly evident that having it in and sparking a civil war amongst the Democrats is the best way to stop the overall bill.”

The Republican rush to support Stupak’s amendment was controversial from the very moment it occurred. Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.), who was in the end the only Republican to vote “present” on the amendment, scorched fellow members of the minority for not joining him and sinking it. National Right to Life Committee warned Republicans it would score a “present” vote as a “no.”

“The Stupak amendment gave political cover to Democrats who voted for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker,” Shadegg said in a statement. “If Republicans had voted ‘present’ as a group, since we are the party of Life, we would have defined the ‘present’ vote as the pro-life vote. Doing so would have denied the purported pro-life Democrats cover. Given the extremely narrow margin of victory for the bill, it’s highly likely that without the Stupak language, it would have been defeated.”

Several other conservatives made this same argument to TWI, and criticized anti-abortion rights groups like the Family Research Council, National Right to Life, and Americans United for Life for backing the amendment and counting “aye” votes as “pro-life” votes. But in a lengthy Monday blog post for The Weekly Standard, John McCormack captured much of the thinking of Republican staffers and strategists–that Democrats were going to win the vote no matter what, and that to vote down the Stupak amendment would have been hypocritical and cynical. “Bringing down Stupak,” wrote McCormack, “would have seriously hurt the effort to defeat Obamacare.”

Anti-abortion rights groups backed up that assessment. “If the pro-life members of the House suddenly, cynically, pulled out the rug from under Stupak,” said Doug Johnson, the legislative director of the National Right to Life Committee, “they would have been asking for defeat. I mean, that would have been a terrific gift to the left. Pro-abortion groups–I’m including pro-Obama front groups who claim to be pro-life groups–would have shouted from the rooftops: ‘You see, they don’t really care about the abortion issue, and when they had a chance they torpedoed it!’ It would have been a train-wreck.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the anti-abortion rights Susan B. Anthony List, agreed with Johnson. Her group marshaled 300,000 emails and phone calls to Congress to back the amendment. “For every single Republican save one to insist on a vote on this, then kill it with ‘present’ votes, would have been cynical beyond words,” Dannenfelser said. The situation for Republicans now, she argued, is a “win-win,” as it forces Democrats to stiff dozens of key members. Only one Republican, Rep. Joseph Cao (R-La.), voted for the bill, doing so after backing the Stupak amendment.

“Think about [Speaker of the House Nancy] Pelosi looking at two letters on her desk,” said Dannenfelser. “I’ve got one letter saying if I don’t take it out, 41 Democrats will vote against it. I’ve got another letter saying keep it in or pro-life Democrats will vote against it. Either way you come up with coalition that can defeat it.”

The ripples of the Stupak vote are hitting the Senate before they can hit Pelosi. A major reason for Republican and conservative self-congratulation about the amendment is the puzzle it’s created for Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). A semi-reliable vote against abortion rights until he became his party’s Senate leader in 2004, Reid is in the position of crafting language that can appeal to Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.)–who has said he approves of the Stupak amendment–provide cover to Democrats like Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.), and avoid losing pro-abortion rights votes like that of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.)

“They’re in a major bind,” said Michael Franc, director of government relations at the Heritage Foundation. “The only way to get out of it is for one of the two Democratic camps to go against something they believe deeply. There has to be intellectual flanking movement, somebody convincing them that the future of party at stake, they can’t let this 100-year achievement flounder over this one thing.”

For anti-abortion rights activists, the muddle is a victory nine months in the making. “If it hadn’t been for National Right to Life working in the trenches since January,” said Douglas Johnson, “this legislation would have passed sooner and by a larger margin. Remember, the president and the speaker and much of the mainstream media had been saying all year long that abortion wasn’t in the bill. If they had been able to pull off this smuggling operation, it would have moved faster and passed sooner.” It happened, said Johnson, because of “the tenacity of pro-life Democrats like Stupak.”

None of the anti-abortion rights groups that supported an “aye” vote on the Stupak amendment will support the final bill. Dannenfelser and Johnson pointed to so-called “rationing,” that Conservatives fear would empower bureaucrats to deny care to some patients, and the exclusion of conscience provisions in the health care bill as surefire reasons why “pro-life” activists would be unable to support it. At the same time, they and Republicans suggested that if the health care bill survived with much of the Stupak language intact, it would be a victory unthinkable just a few months ago.

“If the Stupak amendment is in there, I would definitely define it as one of most important life votes in more than a decade,” said Johnson. “You’d have to go back to 1993. Clinton comes in. Everyone thinks the Hyde amendment [former Rep. Henry Hyde's (R-Ill.) legislation that banned federal funds paying for abortions] is gone, and they are absolutely shocked the day we renew Hyde on the floor of the House.”

There are two echoes here of the just-concluded elections. The first: Republicans out-and-out claimed that ACORN was on the ground in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, and though the group’s credibility has been seriously challenged in recent months, they deny having had any boots on the ground up there.

The second: Many Democrats believe that failed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds blundered in not making an issue out of Republican-led delays in unemployment benefit money, and Governor-elect Bob McDonnell’s role in this. Here are two examples of Democrats really ceding the narrative to aggressive and strategic conservatives.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Rush Limbaugh (WDCpix, Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office)

WASHINGTON — Smelling blood in the water as Democrats made contradictory statements about what a Senate health care reform bill might contain, Republicans spent Tuesday pushing back against a possible compromise–non-profit health insurance cooperatives, an idea that Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) had pushed for months before the debate centered on a Medicare-style “public option.” Inside the Senate and inside the conservative third-party groups that have been working against the White House, “co-ops” are being framed as an attempt to engineer a stealth government takeover of health care.

“It doesn’t matter what you call it,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told reporters on a Tuesday conference call. “They want it to accomplish something that Republicans are opposed to. That is the step towards government-run health care in the country. The president himself said you can imagine a cooperative meeting that definition of a public option.”

Read more at the Michigan Messenger’s sister site, the Washington Independent.

“It’s madness,” said Chessoni on Monday. “His father, in 1961, would not even have been in Kenya. When this matter first came up, the Kenyan government did its research and confirmed that these are all baseless claims.”

Nonetheless, Chessoni spent part of his day fielding inquiries about an image posted at the fringe conservative web site WorldNetDaily–a purported “certified copy of registration of birth” belonging to “Barack Hussein Obama II,” submitted by attorney Orly Taitz in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, part of her undying quest to get a judge to listen to the conspiracy theories about the 44th president of the United States.

Read more at Michigan Messenger’s sister site in the nation’s capital, The Washington Independent.

“The conversation was along the lines of ‘this is idiotic, but explain to me why,’” said the lawyer, who spoke under condition of anonymity to TWI. “I looked at whether the lawsuit was going to be dismissed. I said yes.”

Berg’s main problem was the one that has bedeviled the the small, but growing, number of lawyers and amateur attorneys who have filed frivolous lawsuits against President Obama on the “question” of his American citizenship. He and they have run up against the doctrine of standing, which requires plaintiffs to prove that they have been or will be harmed by the law that they’re challenging. Like the people who challenged McCain’s citizenship in 2008 and 2000, or the people who challenged Dick Cheney’s right to run for vice president because he, like George W. Bush, resided in Texas, “birther” plaintiffs have failed again and again to get their cases heard because they lack standing.

“We monitored the progress of these lawsuits against the Obama campaign,” said Trevor Potter, a Washington attorney who served as general counsel to the 2008 and 2000 McCain presidential campaigns. “The McCain campaign faced a series of lawsuits like this, too, alleging that he could not be president because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Both campaigns took the position that these plaintiffs lacked standing.”

But the flawed conception of the many “birther” lawsuits, coupled with the inexperience and foul-ups of “birther” lawyers, have only fed the frenzy over Obama’s legitimacy to serve as president of the United States. A survey of the lawsuits filed against Obama reveals a reliance on widely debunked rumors, bogus stories sourced back to web sites, affidavits from “experts” who refuse to provide credentials or even their real names, and frequent and blatant misunderstandings of basic constitutional law. The dismissal of “birther” lawsuits has allowed conspiracy theorists to believe that the information in those suits is accurate–a belief that manifests itself in the emails, phone calls, and town hall meeting rants that have pushed the theories into the mainstream media and the halls of Congress.

While they ruled out any chance of the ‘birther’ lawsuits holding up in court, lawyers for the McCain campaign did check into the rumors about Obama’s birth and the assertions made by Berg and others. “To the extent that we could, we looked into the substantive side of these allegations,” said Potter. “We never saw any evidence that then-Senator Obama had been born outside of the United States. We saw rumors, but nothing that could be sourced to evidence. There were no statements and no documents that suggested he was born somewhere. On the other side, there was proof that he was born in Hawaii. There was a certificate issued by the state’s Department of Health, and the responsible official in the state saying that he had personally seen the original certificate. There was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, which would be very difficult to invent or plant 47 years in advance.”

“Birther” lawyers and bloggers, who gained an unexpected prominence in the mainstream media, have consistently denied Hawaii’s own records of Obama’s birth. They have also built up a corpus of information which, they argue, would invalidate Obama’s claim on the White House even if he was born in the United States. These rumors, and the inability of “birther” lawyers to test them in court, have proven pervasive enough to fuel the conspiracy theories.

After the DNC requested a dismissal of Berg’s lawsuit, he responded in a September 29, 2008 filing that cited numerous Internet rumors and incorrect citations of American and international law. Berg cited “Wikipedia Italian version” and “Rainbow Edition News Letter” as evidence that Obama had not been clear about which hospital he was born in; he alleged that Obama must have been adopted by Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian man who married Obama’s mother when the future president was five years old, because he attended elementary school in that country. Because a contemporary school record referred to Obama as “Barry Soetoro” and listed his nationality as “Indonesian,” Berg argued that there was “absolutely no way Obama could have ever regained ‘natural born’ status.”

“That’s just completely wrong,” said Mitzi Torri, an Arizona-based immigration lawyer. Torri pointed to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which sets a high bar for renunciation of American citizenship. According to the INA, an American can only forfeit his citizenship if he commits treason, if he makes a “formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state,” or if he becomes a citizen of another country “upon his own application or upon an application filed by a duly authorized agent.”

“Berg wants to say,” said Torri, “that this document from a school Indonesia, which has no signature, which has no standing whatsoever, is more important than Obama’s birth certificate or our immigration law.”

Berg’s filings made other claims that have shown up in anti-Obama lawsuits and in the proliferation of “birther” Website. One relies on an audio tape of Obama’s step-grandmother Sarah Obama, who lives in Kenya, being goaded into saying (through a translator) that the future president was born in Kenya before quickly correcting herself. (A doctored version of this tape, which cuts off before the retraction, is posted on YouTube) Another claim: Obama traveled to Pakistan in 1981, when it was illegal for an American to do so, suggesting that he used a non-American passport. The problem is that there never was any such ban.

“We have no record of any travel ban between America and Pakistan during that period or since,” said Noel Clay, a spokesman for the State Department.

“We got that from someplace,” Berg told TWI on Thursday. In an email, he added his paralegal was “reviewing” his files on Pakistan. Yet the false claim appears in Orly Taitz’s lawsuit on behalf of perennial presidential candidate Alan Keyes, which argues that Obama visited Pakistan “when entrance to Pakistan was banned to Americans, Christians and Jews,” proof that he gave up his American citizenship.

In October 2008, when Berg v. Obama et al was dismissed for lack of standing, the attorney told sympathetic reporters that the DNC had “admitted” the truth about Obama’s citizenship by not rebutting his claims. Joseph Sandler, who filed motions to dismiss Berg’s case and other Obama citizenship lawsuits as general counsel, explained why claims like these are never debunked by lawyers for the president.

“When you file a motion to dismiss, to try to get the case thrown out before any factual inquiry is made, the facts that the plaintiffs put into their complaint are assumed to be true,” said Sandler. “You have to show that even if the facts were true, they don’t have a case.”

As a result of that, extremely questionable theories and “facts” have become linchpins of ‘birther’ theories. ‘Birthers’ who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of Obama’s Certificate of Live Birth often cite the expertise of “Dr. Ron Polarik,” a self-described “expert in computer graphics” who maintains a blog at Townhall.com and has recorded a video, in which his face and voice are blurred, explaining how the image was “forged” with Adobe Photoshop. “Polarik” submitted an affidavit in support Orly Taitz’s Keyes case that is signed “XXXXXXXXXXX,” making it inadmissible.

“If it ever comes down to it,” explained Gary Kreep, another lawyer for Keyes, “we’ll use his real name.”

Some anti-Obama claims take the issue entirely out of the hands of the president or Hawaii officials. Carl Swensson, a conservative activist from Georgia, has organized “Citizens’ Grand Juries” that have indicted the president for treason. Mario Apuzzo, a New Jersey attorney, has sued Obama on the grounds that he never was, and never could be, a “natural born” citizen. Both men pass over precedent for “The Law of Nations,” the 1758 treatise by the 18th century French scholar Emerich de Vattel. In one translation, de Vattel writes that “the natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” That’s enough for some Obama ‘birthers’ to say that Obama might be a citizen of Kenya–as one constituent of Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) put it–but he cannot be a natural born citizen of the United States. “It’s what the founding fathers used,” explained Swensson.

Constitutional scholars consider this a dubious argument at best. “The framers of the 14th Amendment thought about this,” explained Elizabeth Wydra, chief counsel for the Constitutional Accountability Center. “They wanted to make sure that the children of slaves who were brought here illegally, slaves who were brought into this country after the end of the slave trade, would be citizens.”

Apuzzo is not convinced. He argued that the founders wrote the phrase “natural born citizen” for a reason; to make sure that no one with “blood ties” to another country could become president. He speculated what might happen if Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), whose parents were Indian, became president. “India is a nuclear power. Here comes the president, who says we have to go in and attack Pakistan. Are we doing that because we are defending India’s interests? You just don’t know. You can’t have Constitutional rule if you allow this.”

Because of the dismissal tactics used by lawyers for the president, John McCain, and both political parties, believers in these various theories and readings of the Constitution argue that they have never been proven wrong. Although Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) explained his support of a House bill that would require copies of birth certificates from presidential candidates by saying it would “put all this to rest,” the very frivolity and obscurity of the challenges to Obama suggest the beginning of a conspiracy theory that will never be debunked to the satisfaction of its believers.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. (Creative Commons photo by ajagendorf25 via Flickr)

WASHINGTON — The lengthy speech on health care that Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele delivered on Monday was short on details. Republicans, said Steele, wanted to address “runaway costs,” and had a few ideas on how to do that, such as posting the cost of treatments “openly on the Internet,” supporting “bold new incentives” for medical breakthroughs, and “no life-time health care benefits and insurance for congressmen who leave their jobs.”

Most of Steele’s event at the National Press Club consisted of scorching attacks on President Obama’s agenda for health care reform, and on the early drafts of health care legislation that have been scored by the Congressional Budget Office at around $1 trillion. Much of the speech had been telegraphed two weeks earlier in a poll conducted for the RNC and a corresponding memo from Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant who worked for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, which argued that Republicans could kill Democratic plans for health care reform by dragging out the debate.

“If we slow this sausage-making process down,” Castellanos wrote, “we can defeat it.” The “key message” for Republicans would be “We’ve got to ‘SLOW DOWN the OBAMA EXPERIMENT WITH OUR HEALTH’.” In his Monday speech, Steele used the word “experiment” or some version of it no fewer than 30 times. In a new television ad airing in North Dakota, Nevada, and Arkansas — all states with at least one Democratic senator on the ballot in 2010 — the RNC casts health care reform, again, as a “risky experiment.”

Steele’s performance was less a kick-off, more an amplification of a year-long conservative campaign that is entering its final months without much remaining subtlety. Republicans are in the precarious position of arguing for a “pause button,” as Steele put it, in the ongoing negotiations over health care, while Democrats are aware that any pause or slow-down would effectively kill reform in the 111th Congress.

There are Republican alternatives that have no chance of passage; the Patients’ Choice Act sponsored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), for example, has six co-sponsors. Republicans are testing brand-new health care messaging against Democrats in swing states, while those same Democrats are aware that a failure to pass health care reform would drain their political capital and worsen their chances of re-election in 2010.

“If it doesn’t happen this year it’s not going to happen,” said one House GOP aide. “If too many members have concerns about this in an off-year, even their ranks are only going to grow in an election year.”

It’s been difficult for Republicans to avoid the occasional blunt remark that reveals that fact. High-minded “working groups” on health care reform have given way to an alliance with Rick Scott, the former private hospital CEO who launched Conservatives for Patients’ Rights in March. Scott’s checkered experience in health care — he resigned from Columbia/HCA in 1997 after a $1.7 billion fraud settlement — did not immediately win him many public alliances with the GOP. But by the time Scott appeared at the launch of Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) own health care plan in June, some Republicans were echoing the message in his TV ads, that Congress needed to slow down the pace of health care reform.

After that event, in a brief conversation with The Washington Independent, Michigan Messenger’s sister site in the nation’s capital, Scott remarked that “the debate really changed” since he’d launched his group, and that a slow-down of reform would be the end of Democratic plans for health care. “If they don’t get it done by October,” said Scott, “it’s not going to get done.”

The directness of Scott’s campaign backfired a little last week when he co-hosted a conference call with DeMint. On the call, DeMint argued that a Republican victory on health care would “break” Obama and steer political momentum away from Democrats. In a Monday night interview with the News Hour on PBS, the president credited DeMint with saying what Republicans were really thinking.

“There is a certain portion of the Republican Party that views this like they saw ’93, ’94, the last time there was a major health-reform effort,” said the president. “They explicitly went after the Clintons, said we’re not going to get this done … it was a pure political play, a show of strength by the Republicans that helped them regain the House.”

Some Republicans are even trying to frame the debate to ensure that if they do manage to kill health care reform, Obama will get the blame for it. “Everyone has said, flat out, that they’re in favor of health care reform,” said Sean Eastman, a spokesman for Michigan Congressman Dave Camp (R-Midland), who’s taken a leading role in the party’s health care messaging. “If the president draws a line in sand and says ‘it’s this or nothing,’ I’d suggest it’s the president who’s killing health care reform.”

All of this puts Republicans in the acrobatic position of throwing up roadblocks to kill health care reform this year while, in the states, attempting to convince vulnerable Democrats that successful health care reform would be a political boondoggle that could end their control of Congress. In conversations with The Washington Independent, Republican strategists in the states targeted by the RNC’s new ads had some difficulty squaring the circle. “We all saw what happened the last time there was a major push by a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress to mandate government-run health care,” said Robert Uithoven, a Republican strategist in Nevada.

While Uithoven acknowledged that the Democrats of 1994 stumbled by failing to pass any health care reform, he argued that success this year could be a problem, too. “Harry Reid succeeding on this would be disastrous for the country. The more people learn about the cost, the more dangerous it is for Reid to succeed in this effort.”

Bill Vickery, an Arkansas Republican strategist who plans to work for his party’s nominee against Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), claimed that it would be “politically disastrous” for the senator to support a health care bill with a public plan. “If she votes for it and it passes you say, once again, she sided with the ultra-liberal president, she’s a toady for the administration. If she votes against it, maybe it’s a non-starter politically. And if she votes for it and the bill fails anyway, you make a more nuanced version of that first argument.”

Those arguments run up against the plans of other vulnerable Democrats, who are already running on health care reform. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who has taken the lead on health care legislation in the absence of the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), is on the air with ads that feature Kennedy praising Dodd for his work on “the cause of my life.” Former Rep. Rob Simmons (R-Conn.), who is running against Dodd, has an opening if reform falters.

“Dodd believes that whatever legislation he rams through Congress will accrue to his benefit,” said Jim Barnett, Simmons’ campaign manager. “The problem is that voters are judging him on honesty, and nobody trusts him, so he’s staking a lot on the idea he that he’s getting things done in the Senate. If the effort fails or if it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, it will be painful for him.”

Joslin, the president of the Alaska branch of the conservative Eagle Forum and a longtime Republican activist, saw the possible good in Palin’s surprise decision to leave office at the end of July and, in her words, “effect positive change outside government at this point in time on another scale and actually make a difference for our priorities.” Ten years ago, Joslin was informed that her son Isaiah would be born with Trisomy-13 — in other words, anomalies that would mean severe retardation and early death. She rejected advice to fly to George Tiller’s clinic in Kansas to terminate the pregnancy. Her son died 32 days after he was born. Joslin got a letter from Palin, then the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, praising her courage. When Palin’s son Trig was born with Downs Syndrome, Joslin gave her moral support, and even filled in for Palin to accept an award from the Republican National Coalition for Life.

Continue reading at the Michigan Messenger’s sister site, the Washington Independent.

“I have said for years that we ought to get the U.S. out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of the U.S.,” said U.S. Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), addressing the crowd in an impromptu speech. “I’ll do everything I can in the Congress to maintain the U.S. as a sovereign nation, subservient to no one but the almighty God.”

A series of traffic delays meant that, Frank Gaffney, the president of the Center for Security Policy, was the last supporter of the new caucus to give a speech. He bemoaned the confirmation of Harold Koh as Legal Adviser to the State Department, an “enemy” of sovereignty, shortly after the Senate had agreed to move ahead to a vote on his nomination. But he was optimistic. “We may now have in the House a vehicle for keeping the so-called ‘Upper House’ more honest on these issues.”

While Republicans and conservative activists were disappointed by the confirmation of Koh, the long delay leading up to the vote and its relative closeness — 65 to 31 to end debate on the nomination and 62-35 to confirm him — have boosted their hopes of successfully battling treaties that they characterize as threats to American rights and national interests. Treaties need the votes of 67 senators to be ratified, and can gum up the business of the Senate for weeks if they become flash points for controversy. The Convention on the Rights of the Child, for example, has convinced Michigan’s Pete Hoekstra of Holland — a member of the House Sovereignty Caucus — to introduce a Constitutional amendment protecting the right of American parents to discipline their children and send them to religious schools.

Those hopes are likely to be tested at least twice this year. According to staffers for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or the Law of the Sea Treaty — a 1982 treaty that governs the right of countries to use the oceans — could be reintroduced next month. And President Obama is in Russia this week in part to move forward the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, the 1996 agreement on weapons testing that was rejected by the Senate in 1999, when the upper chamber contained 55 Republicans and 45 Democrats. Of the 16 treaties that the State Department included on its priority list in a May 11 letter to the committee, both sides agree that these two will be the first to face full votes. And both sides agree that the Koh vote provided a good idea of the support these treaties might command from a very skeptical Senate Republican conference.

“The vote against Harold Koh is probably the minimum vote against both of those treaties,” said John Bolton, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under George W. Bush, and who has been a forceful critic of both treaties. “I think that a lot of Republicans, whether they agreed or disagreed with Koh’s views, basically agreed that president had the right to appoint his own team. Whether they would also support these treaties, given their concerns about national sovereignty, is another question.”

The power to approve treaties rests entirely with the Senate; on the surface, that would seem to make the House Sovereignty Caucus and its supporters less relevant. But both supporters and opponents of the treaties said that skeptics of international law and international agreements will have an outsized influence in this debate. Senate staffers from both parties, experts from liberal groups, and experts from conservative groups all cited the same handful of people as the ones able to turn opinion on treaties: Bolton, Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, and fellows at the Heritage Foundation and Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). For an example of their influence, one supporter of the treaties pointed out what happens when someone does a basic Google search for “Law of the Sea.” The first links include the Heritage Foundation’s page on the treaty, CEI’s page, and the site UNLawoftheSeaTreaty.org, owned by another think tank that opposes the treaty.

Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at CEI, said that there was some truth to this characterization. “At the one end, the American people are very suspicious of more United Nations involvement in their lives,” said Ebell. “When you’re saying that you’ll put the UN in charge of the oceans, that’s pretty strongly opposed by the American people. But at the other end, most Washington insiders, a lot of experts who work on this, a lot of admirals, say we ought to do that and say that the problems have been fixed since President Reagan opposed it. So we’re not a very broad coalition.”

Treaty supporters, who had hoped that a Democratic president and heavily Democratic Senate could get past this standoff, are frustrated by the conservatives’ success. “The fight over the Law of the Sea has been a textbook example of the politics of intensity trumping the politics of common sense,” said Don Kraus, the CEO of Citizens for Global Solutions, a group that supports both treaties. “The treaty’s narrow group of opponents have whipped up conspiracy theories to feed political temper tantrums in swing states.”

While negotiations that could lead to progress on the CTBT are taking center stage this week, treaty opponents are focusing on the Law of the Sea Treaty because it will come up first, and because its fate in the last Congress provided a roadmap for both sides. A tough campaign against the treaty, which included TV ads from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and pressure on conservative senators like U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), whittled down its support. U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who had long supported the treaty, backed down and said that it needed “changes” shortly before the 2008 New Hampshire presidential primary.

According to Baker Spring, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, opposition to international law and treaties like these has coalesced in the wake of the campaign against the Law of the Sea Treaty and because of worries about President Barack Obama. “We have a president in office who is potentially serious about this agenda. Nobody held the view that George W. Bush was going to scurry down a road that would undermine our national sovereignty.”

Spring suggested that U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, slow-walked the treaty last year because he wanted to get a majority of Republicans on board. Lugar spokesman Mark would not confirm that, but he pointed out that so far the Obama administration’s support for the treaty is comparable to the Bush administration’s — just one of the items on the priority list. “The Obama campaign was fantastic at using social networking to organize and build up grassroots support,” said Hayes. “The administration has chosen to use that skill on some campaigns, like the health care push, but not on other campaigns.”

Unless that happens, skeptics of international law suggested that high-visibility coalitions like the House Sovereignty Caucus can win the argument.

“I think it can have a real impact if it raises the volume of the debate,” said John Bolton. “The higher the salience of the issue, for conservatives in particular, the greater the likelihood that people will oppose these treaties.”