They don’t list Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s height on her official House Web site. No fighting weight either. One could surmise that Pelosi is maybe around 5-foot and 110 pounds. Maybe.

But after the U.S. House voted to pass the Senate’s comprehensive health-care reform bill on Sunday, March 21, Pelosi – often called the most powerful woman in America even before that historic  bill passed – re-emerged this week as a legitimate political giant.

My heavens what are creative conservatives attackers going to call her now?

Recall that earlier this month, right-wing talk show buffoon Rush Limbaugh actually compared Pelosi to Osama bin Laden, telling his listeners that, “Mullah Nancy Bin Pelosi … is no different” than those who “convince all these people to put bombs on their kids.”

My, my:  How clever.

In one sense, though, you can see why Limbaugh and his conservative pals are so frustrated and furious.

Health-care reform was dead – and then it wasn’t.

Democrats were toast – and then they weren’t.

The very fact that a comprehensive health-care reform package actually passed and was signed into law by President Obama represents a legitimate political miracle.

Remember that few House members cared for the Senate bill. Many more openly despised it.

Yet Pelosi – aided greatly by the president’s arm-twisting muscle and public cheerleading  – managed to convince reluctant House members that it was not only in their best interests to swallow hard and pass this deal, but that it indeed represented the last chance to achieve that first giant leap toward comprehensive health-care reform.

And, by the way, Pelosi and the president added, if House members didn’t pass the bill, God help them in November because they couldn’t.

So 219 House Democrats took the plunge Sunday, did the right thing, voted for the Senate bill and the reconciliation fixes and immediately transformed Pelosi into a legitimate health-care reform hero.

Then, those formerly reluctant Democratic House members came back and did it again Thursday to clean-up some Senate reconciliation fixes.

Talk about a wonderful birthday for Pelosi, who turned 70 on Friday.

Naturally, the Democrats’ triumph gave GOP campaign strategists an idea. You can almost see the imaginary light bulb click on. The National Republican Congressional Committee still believes one key to victory in November’s midterm elections is to run against “scary liberal” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. They even dreamed up a spiffy new Web site to raise money for the effort.

The Talking Points Memo blog, with the screaming headline GOP Targets Nancy Pelosi As Public Enemy No. 1, details the renewed effort to villainize the speaker.

Here is a taste:

She’s been dubbed the most powerful speaker in a century, and was singled out by President Obama as being a critical force for passing a sweeping health care reform overhaul. But for the Republicans, she equals fundraising gold – a San Francisco liberal who fires up the base and creates an endless supply of photo fodder.

GOP pollsters find that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is one of the most recognized Congressional leaders in decades. That’s one reason the term “PelosiCare” has found its way into Republican mailers and television ads, and GOP sources tell us that will keep up in the coming months.

“The voters cannot fire Barack Obama in November but they can fire Nancy Pelosi,” said Wes Anderson, a GOP pollster who contracts with the Republican National Committee. “The only other person voters are as concerned about is President Obama. They find she shares his ideology but not his charm.”

Republicans trotted out this time-honored tactic in the 2006 midterms when Pelosi was merely the House Minority Leader and the presumed next speaker if Democrats retook the House. Which is what the Democrats did in November 2006, and the Pelosi demonizing intensified after she became the first female Speaker of the House.

Republicans tried this doomed strategy again in the 2008 and watched Democrats gain unprecedented majorities in the House and Senate while Obama won the presidency.

And Republicans are apparently plotting to try this failed strategy yet again this fall even as Pelosi receives rave reviews for providing the tactical legwork and muscle that built momentum for House Democrats to pass the Senate’s flawed comprehensive health-care reform bill.

A taste from the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait’s blog (Chait concurs):

One of the subplots of the health care story is that everybody has woken up to the fact that Nancy Pelosi is an extremely effective Speaker of the House. The House is a pliable, majoritarian institution, so it’s not unusual for a Speaker to wield a lot of power (conversely, it is rare for a Senate Majority Leader to be seen as powerful.) Still, even correcting for that, Pelosi deserves enormous credit for the health care bill. In the wake of Scott Brown’s election, she stayed clear-headed when Democrats all around her succumbed to panic.

Pelosi lacks much in the way of eloquence – her speech last night, like her Blair House remarks, was borderline cringe-inducing. But the combination of President Obama as the chief public explainer and Pelosi running the show behind the scenes is an extremely formidable combination.

Now Pelosi’s greatest crime in the eyes of the Republican propaganda machine, besides happening to be a gifted female politician, is she also happens to call San Francisco home.

You know – where all those gay liberals hang out.

So scary!

The lame Republican efforts to demonize Pelosi as some frightening San Francisco liberal that could actually scare Americans into voting for GOP congressional candidates remains laughable.

For starters, most Americans wouldn’t know Pelosi if they ran into her at Wegmans. And most of the Americans who do know Pelosi realize she’s nothing like the false portrait Republicans waste time and millions trying to paint.

That Pelosi still isn’t a household name is too bad. Even before becoming speaker, Pelosi was a formidable political presence in the House. Think about it: Do you realize how skilled and tough Pelosi had to be to rise through the ranks of the male House Democratic Party hierarchy? Think about how many cantankerous old bulls she had to challenge, fight and defeat.

Now sure it’s true, Pelosi is a liberal. So be afraid if you want.

But Pelosi really is what every successful Democratic leader must become: She is at heart a master pragmatist. In the unwieldy governing Democratic coalition, filled with liberals, progressives and Blue Dog moderates, limousine liberals needn’t apply for work.

The unfortunate reality is most Americans don’t know and won’t care about that political miracle Pelosi pulled off in the past two months.

But please remember this health-care reform was universally deemed a lost cause following Scott Brown’s shocking Massachusetts special Senate election victory. A victory, mind you, that robbed Democrats of its 60^th filibuster-breaking vote. The Democratic Party sky was indeed falling.

Yet Pelosi realized her caucus couldn’t credibly stand for re-election with a controversial health-care vote without a real health-care reform law. She joined forces with the president and Senate Majority Harry Reid to rescue what rightly should have been a historic lost opportunity for health-care reform and a near fatal blow for congressional Democrats in November.

It’s an astonishing achievement for Obama, Pelosi and Reid.

As the lights shine brightly now, Pelosi is something of a reluctant political star. She isn’t particularly articulate. Her sound bites are seldom  memorable. She isn’t a favorite on the Sunday morning news talk circuit.

But what  Pelosi remains is a winner. In America’s political battlegrounds, that is all that matters. Because winners gets things done in our democracy. And in the past two months, Pelosi got health care done in a big and historic way.

And you know what I see looking at little, ol’  Nancy Pelosi? I see a true giant of the House.

Dahlkemper Makes The Right And Brave Votes

Because I’ve done some work and hope to do some more for Erie’s 3^rd District Congresswoman Kathy Dahlkemper’s re-election campaign, I haven’t blogged about the congresswoman’s delicate position in the recent health-care reform debate.

Abortion is an intensely personal issue that affects politicians in different ways. In Dahlkemper’s case, she struggled mightily on how to vote on both the House’s original bill (voted for it), Sunday’s House passage of the Senate bill (voted for it) and Thursday’s reconciliation Senate fixes (voted for it).

In the end, Dahlkemper felt comfortable enough with the Senate bill’s abortion language and President Obama’s executive order reinforcing the Hyde Amendment’s federally-funded abortion prohibition, to vote for comprehensive health-care reform.

This is what matters.

Now what does Dahlkemper get for her brave votes? Scores of threats and hateful phone calls to her congressional offices. See Erie Times-News reporter John Guerriero’s story in the Erie Times-News (Inundated with threats).

Is There A Legal Case Against The Health-Care Bill?

Here is the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein’s smart take on whether there is a legal case for Republicans to make:

With the votes counted and the legislative battle finishing, conservatives are turning to a different branch of government to fight health-care reform: the courts. Their most promising tactic was to argue that “deem and pass” would be unconstitutional because the House and the Senate passed slightly different versions of the same bill. Previous challenges on those grounds had failed, but this is a different court and health-care reform is a different beast. But then the House rejected deem and pass and voted on the bill through the normal order. Undeterred, conservatives – most prominently Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s ambitious attorney general – are planning to file suit against the individual mandate.

So is this – or any of the other challenges being contemplated by conservatives – likely to work? The basic answer is that the Supreme Court does not like to invalidate important laws passed by Congress. But for a more thorough look, see this article by Dave Weigel (who will soon be my colleague here at The Post!).

To put it very simply: This is good politics for conservatives but an unlikely legal strategy. And as Dave’s article makes clear, the politicians pushing it know that as well as anyone. Two of the grounds for challenges that most excited conservatives (“deem and pass” and the Nelson deal) will not be relevant to the final bill, as “deem and pass” wasn’t used and the Nelson deal is going to be erased in reconciliation. That means conservatives are largely left with the individual mandate – an idea developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation and passed into law in Massachusetts by Republican presidential aspirant Mitt Romney – and that’s very unlikely to be repealed.

It’s also less important if it is repealed. The virtue of challenging how the law is passed is that a successful effort could invalidate the whole thing. Not so with the individual mandate, which is a small (though important) piece of the bill. If the unlikely happened and the mandate was repealed, you could simply replace it with something like this and the bill would work very much as intended.

And as a final note, let me propose a new rule: No conservative who supports these legal challenges can complain about activist judges ever again.

Amen to that.

Tires-to-Energy Trouble In Chicago Suburbs

Erie Renewable Energy LLC’s proposed $370 million tires-to-energy plant has some company in controversy. The Chicago Tribune recently reported (tire-burning) that “Illinois lawmakers are moving to include tire burning in the state’s definition of renewable energy, a change that would benefit a south suburban incinerator with a long history of pollution problems.”

Here is a taste from reporter Michael Hawthorne’s story:

Adding the “incineration or burning of tires” to a measure intended to boost wind and solar energy would clear the way for Geneva Energy to reap lucrative green energy credits for its troubled incinerator in Ford Heights, one of the poorest suburbs in the U.S.
The legislative change also would make the tire burner a player in the growing market for renewable energy in Illinois, where power companies must get at least 10 percent of their electricity from green sources by 2015 and 25 percent by 2025.
Originally sponsored by Rep. David Miller a Dolton Democrat running for state comptroller, the measure would give tire burning, which generates large amounts of toxic air pollution, the same status as pollution-free wind and solar power. It apparently is designed to benefit the state’s sole tire incinerator, in Miller’s district.
A House committee approved Miller’s bill last week, days after an investigator from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency‘s civil rights division interviewed state officials about the tire burner. The agency is probing whether Illinois violated environmental justice laws by allowing the incinerator to operate in Ford Heights, a small village about 25 miles south of downtown Chicago, where more than 95 percent of the population is black and half live in poverty.
If the legislation pending on the House floor is approved, it would not only add tire incineration to the state’s renewable energy law but also revoke a specific ban that says green power “does not include the incineration or burning of tires.”

What is interesting here is that final paragraph. The EPA’s interest here could also have ramifications for Erie Renewable Energy LLC’s proposed plant on 60 acres at the former International Paper site.

It seems clear the federal government is taking a serious interest in how individual states regulate tire-burning facilities. That means whatever Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection ultimately decides on Erie Renewable’s proposal might not be the last word.

Yes, elections do have consequences. In this case, the federal variety.