The Senate Parliamentarian has ruled that President Barack Obama must sign Congress’ original health care reform bill before the Senate can act on a companion reconciliation package, senior GOP sources said Thursday.

The Senate Parliamentarian’s Office was responding to questions posed by the Republican leadership. The answers were provided verbally, sources said.

House Democratic leaders have been searching for a way to ensure that any move they make to approve the Senate-passed $871 billion health care reform bill is followed by Senate action on a reconciliation package of adjustments to the original bill. One idea is to have the House and Senate act on reconciliation prior to House action on the Senate’s original health care bill.

Information Republicans say they have received from the Senate Parliamentarian’s Office eliminates that option. House Democratic leaders last week began looking at crafting a legislative rule that would allow the House to approve the Senate health care bill, but not forward it to Obama for his signature until the Senate clears the reconciliation package.

Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) moved Thursday to put Senate Republicans on the defensive over health care, sending a letter to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in which he dared the GOP to vote against reform.

Reid also defended the Democrats’ use of reconciliation to get a final health care reform bill to the president’s desk, noting that the bulk of health care reform was approved under regular order via the package that cleared the Senate on Christmas Eve. Reid also emphasized that Republicans have used the procedure several times over the years. ...

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A top Chinese official said Tuesday that Beijing will not use its vast holdings of U.S. government debt for political gain, just a few days after a forecast projected that the U.S. national debt is on course to triple to $20 trillion over the next decade.

China holds the world's largest cache of foreign exchange reserves, which soared more than $450 billion last year to reach $2.4 trillion at year's end. Concerns about Beijing's plans for its holdings have peaked in recent weeks after Chinese military officials suggested using that debt to pressure the United States in other policy areas.

But a top Chinese state financial officer Tuesday rejected that approach.

"The U.S. Treasury market is the world's largest government bond market," said Yi Gang, the head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. "Our foreign exchange reserves are huge, so you can imagine that the U.S. Treasury market is important to us," he said during the annual session of China's parliament.

Mr. Yi emphasized his hope that China's investment in U.S. Treasury securities would not become a political football.

"This is purely market-driven investment behavior. I would hope not to see this matter politicized," he said in response to a question about American concerns that Beijing's holdings of U.S. debt posed a political threat. "China is a responsible investor, and we fully believe such investments can be mutually beneficial."

Mr. Yi expressed those views one month after a senior military official in the People's Liberation Army recommended using economic measures to retaliate against a $6 billion arms package that the United States agreed to sell to Taiwan. ...

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Last year's underdog became this year's front-runner Tuesday when Doug Hoffman - whose 2009 congressional race became a rallying cry for the "tea party" movement - announced he would seek the Republican nomination in New York's 23rd District.

Mr. Hoffman's Conservative Party campaign last fall in the upstate district ignited grass-roots supporters, but fell 4,000 votes short of an upset victory in the three-way special election won by Bill Owens, who became the first Democrat to represent the district in decades.

"I'm just an average citizen, standing up to say, 'We're fed up. We're not going to take this any more,' " Mr. Hoffman told The Washington Times in a telephone interview Tuesday. "I don't think anybody should expect to inherit political office ... . I'm going to work very hard to earn the respect and support of all the voters in the district."

An accountant from Saranac Lake, Mr. Hoffman became the first Republican to officially declare his candidacy in the largely rural 23rd Congressional District, which sprawls across upstate New York from Lake Ontario on the west to the Vermont border on the east. ...

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Most Americans know that Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of “The Declaration of Independence”, the most important of all our founding documents.

Yet few of them have even heard of another document that I would say might be the second most important declaration he ever wrote: The Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. He drafted them secretly while he was serving as vice president. It was written in response to the hated Alien and Sedition Acts which were passed under the Adams administration during an undeclared war with France.

The acts authorized the president to deport any resident alien considered dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States, to apprehend and deport resident aliens if their home countries were at war with the United States, and criminalized any speech which might defame Congress, the President, or bring either of them into contempt or disrepute. You could compare it to the Patriot Act, but really it was much worse. Either way, The Alien and Sedition Acts were probably Thomas Jefferson’s worst nightmare.

Some people are surprised to learn that in response to these acts, Jefferson did not hold up the First Amendment in protest. Rather he invoked the Tenth Amendment, which states that:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Essentially, he argued that by passing and enforcing the Alien and Sedition Acts, the federal government had over stepped its bounds and was exercising powers which belonged to the states.

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Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- The pro-life Democrats in the House are still standing firm against the Senate health care bill and its abortion funding. If they hold their ground until the end and put pro-life principles ahead of partisan politics or threats from President Barack Obama or Speaker Nancy Pelosi, they could find themselves heroes.

With a lopsided majority in Congress, Pelosi should have no problem railroading the Senate bill through the House.

But, led by Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, a stalwart group of pro-life Democrats is giving Pelosi fits by threatening to vote no because the Senate bill contains massive abortion funding and other problems.

"Some people are saying we have to vote for the Senate bill. That ain't going to happen," Stupak said last week.

The strategy to win over Stupak and his colleagues has, so far, centered on two ideas: deny and negotiate.

Pelosi has gone out of her way to deny that abortion funding is in the Senate health care bill while she and her top lieutenants talk about a companion bill that could be passed alongside the Senate bill and reconciliation measure to pacify Stupak. ...

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All high school math teacher Bradley Johnson wanted to do was honor our nation’s history and religious heritage the same way he always had. For twenty five years, a red, white and blue-striped banner adorned his classroom walls with national maxims such as “In God We Trust,” “One Nation Under God, “ “God Bless America,” and “God Shed his Grace On Thee.” A second banner accompanied it, containing an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, “All Men are Created Equal and They Are Endowed by Their Creator.”

But displaying a portion of the Declaration of Independence and other national mottos was just too offensive to the Poway Unified School District in San Diego. It ordered Johnson to remove the banners from his classroom because they “over-emphasized” God – one school official said it might “offend” Muslim students. Fortunately, Johnson went to federal court to fight this absurd order (represented by the Thomas More Law Center), and even more fortunately, given that California is in the 9th Circuit, the most liberal appeals circuit in the nation, a federal judge found on February 26 that the school board’s actions violated Mr. Johnson’s constitutional rights. ...

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Senior Senate GOP leadership aides have settled on a new strategy that, they hope, will stall or kill the Dem health reform push: They are going to use the arcane “Byrd rule” to try to bleed the reconciliation fix to death and ensure that it never passes.

Senior GOP aides have been studying the rule book in recent days, and they think they have a game plan. Here’s how they hope it will work.

At risk of oversimplification, the Byrd rule is designed to ensure that reconciliation is used to only make budgetary fixes, not policy ones, to existing legislation. Presuming the House passes the Senate bill, the House will then pass a reconciliation fix to the bill, after which the Senate will then try to pass that fix, too.

At this point Senate GOPers will repeatedly invoke the Byrd rule to ask the parliamentarian to strip individual provisions (ones fixing this or that in the original bill) out of the fix, on the grounds that they are policy fixes. If individual provisions are stripped, it would change the Senate’s version of the overall fix. ...

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The political world is fixated on whether this year's elections will deliver an epic rebuke of President Barack Obama and his party. If that happens, it could end up costing Democrats congressional seats for a decade to come.

Some of the most important contests this fall will be way down the ballot in communities like Portsmouth, Ohio and West Lafayette, Ind., and neighborhoods like Brushy Creek in Round Rock, Texas, and Murrysville Township in Westmoreland County, Pa. These are state legislative races that will determine who redraws congressional district lines after this year's census, a process that could determine which party controls upwards of 20 seats and whether many other seats will be competitive.

Next year, legislatures in the 44 states with more than one congressional seat will adjust their districts' boundaries to account for changes in population.

Some 18 state legislatures could have an additional task. As many as 10 states will have to combine districts as they lose House seats. Eight states are expected to gain at least one seat each.

Seats will almost certainly move out of Democratic states (such as Michigan, New York and Massachusetts) and into Republican-leaning, faster-growing states (such as Arizona, Georgia, Texas and Utah). Battleground states such as Iowa and Ohio might also lose seats. This process will be marked by a historic event: For the first time since joining the union in 1850, California will probably not get any additional seat in Congress. ...

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Today marks the seventh year that we have published the Index of Dependence on Government. And, for seven years running, our Index shows growing dependence. The Index now stands at 240, up from a value of 19 in 1962, or a nearly 13 fold increase since the Kennedy administration. The rate of growth, however, actually has increased over the last eight years. That period saw the second highest rate of growth in dependency creating programs: since 2001, the Index has increased 31 percent. Most disturbing of all, all of the evidence points to even more rapid increases in dependency ahead, which well could threaten democratic government.

From virtually the first day of his presidency, Barack Obama and his top deputies have advanced programs and initiatives that deepen and expand American citizens’ dependency on government. From new federal programs designed to boost economic activity to health care reform that could place the U.S. government at the center of the nation’s health care system, the central thrust of policy since January 2009 has been to increase Americans’ daily dependency on Washington. ...

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Flanked, again, by doctors in lab coats, President Barack Obama gave yet another speech this afternoon urging Congress to pass his health care reform plan.

The President again claimed his plan lowers health care costs. It doesn’t.

The President again claimed his plan would not give government bureaucrats or insurance company bureaucrats more control over health care. It does.

The President again claimed that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” That simply is not true.

The President again said his plan gives the American people the same health care as Members of Congress. It doesn’t.

The President again claimed his plan is paid for. It is not. ...

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Congressman Eric Massa of the 29th district of New York has announced that he is retiring. Politico reports that there are allegations that he sexually harassed a staffer and that he has health issues, so let us say it is not clear exactly what precipitated his decision. In addition, this was anything but a safe seat. Massa defeated Republican incumbent Randy Kuhl in 2008 by a 51%-49% margin while John McCain was carrying the district 50%-48%. Massa lost to Kuhl 51%-49% in 2006; George W. Bush carried the district 56%-42% in 2004.

In November Massa voted against the House Democrats’ health care bill, charging that it did not go far enough; it’s a good guess that the Democratic leadership will work to get his vote for the Senate bill. ...

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By Sen. Jim DeMint

You'd think the Obama administration is busy enough controlling the banks, insurance companies and automakers, but thanks to whistleblowers at the Department of the Interior, we now learn they're planning to increase their control over energy-rich land in the West.

A secret administration memo has surfaced revealing plans for the federal government to seize more than 10 million acres from Montana to New Mexico, halting job- creating activities like ranching, forestry, mining and energy development. Worse, this land grab would dry up tax revenue that's essential for funding schools, firehouses and community centers.

President Obama could enact the plans in this memo with just the stroke of a pen, without any input from the communities affected by it.

At a time when our national unemployment rate is 9.7 percent, it is unbelievable anyone would be looking to stop job-creating energy enterprises, yet that's exactly what's happening.

The document lists 14 properties that, according to the document, "might be good candidates" for Mr. Obama to nab through presidential proclamation. Apparently, Washington bureaucrats believe it's more important to preserve grass and rocks for birdwatchers and backpackers than to keep these local economies thriving....

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Last week’s bipartisan summit on health care reform seems to have done little, if anything, to build support for the President’s vision of health care reform.  Strong opposition to the Democrats’ proposals remains the position of a majority of Americans.  And now, even the President’s biggest fans are following suit.

In an interview‘ with CNBC, Warren Buffett, a Democrat and supporter of President Obama, advised the President to follow the wishes of the American people to scrap the current health care legislation and start over.  Buffett highlighted the failure of Democrats’ proposals to address cost as his biggest concern:

We have a health system that, in terms of costs, is really out of control…And if you take this line and you project what has been happening into the future, we will get less and less competitive. So we need something else. ...

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The organization responsible for an undercover investigative video showing Wisconsin Planned Parenthood officials hiding a case of sexual abuse and urging violation of the state's parental consent law has sent the full tape to state and local authorities.

As LifeNews.com reported, Live Action released the 10th video in a series showing Planned Parenthood centers across the nation covering up cases of statutory rape.

The videos also show officials giving misleading information about fetal development and abortion and urging teens to avoid parental involvement laws.

Live Action has made public the full, unedited video from its undercover investigation and sent it to the Wisconsin Attorney General and Milwaukee District Attorney.

Last week, Planned Parenthood Wisconsin CEO Teri Huyck called the videos "highly edited" and accused Live Action of manipulating footage to make a "false and inflammatory" video.

"Assuming this patient gave us her name, we would report it," Huyck said. "The so-called patient in this case did not provide identifying information. In fact, she refused."

Yet, the full footage includes Planned Parenthood staff taking down a full name for the girl, "Janelle Marion," and a birth date, in order to help her obtain a judicial bypass waiver for her abortion. ...

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With uncharacteristic bluntness, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke warned Congress on Wednesday that the United States could soon face a debt crisis like the one in Greece, and declared that the central bank will not help legislators by printing money to pay for the ballooning federal debt.

Recent events in Europe, where Greece and other nations with large, unsustainable deficits like the United States are having increasing trouble selling their debt to investors, show that the U.S. is vulnerable to a sudden reversal of fortunes that would force taxpayers to pay higher interest rates on the debt, Mr. Bernanke said.

"It's not something that is 10 years away. It affects the markets currently," he told the House Financial Services Committee. "It is possible that bond markets will become worried about the sustainability [of yearly deficits over $1 trillion], and we may find ourselves facing higher interest rates even today."

It was some of the toughest rhetoric to date about the nation's fiscal and budgetary woes from the Fed chief, who faces a second round of questioning Thursday before a Senate panel.

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