In a surprising vote, the House of Representatives failed to extend controversial provisions of the PATRIOT Act this evening. Twenty-six Republicans broke with leadership and opposed the bill, which gained a majority of votes — 277 to 148 — but failed to pass because it was moved to the floor under suspension rules, which require a two-thirds majority for passage. A majority of Democrats voted against the extension, with 122 opposed and 67 in favor. The vote is a temporary victory for civil libertarians and rebuke to the White House, which earlier today released a statement supporting the extension, but the vote is also a significant defeat for the new Republican leadership in the House. Bills are typically only brought up under suspension rules if it’s assumed the vote will be non-controversial, but it’s clear that Republican leaders did not anticipate the opposition from within their party:

There was no sign that the leadership saw the setbacks coming. … It was a specifically rough patch for Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who was the subject of much finger-pointing after the vote, as he is charged with vote-counting. [...]

[M]any of the no-votes were freshmen who felt completely uninformed by their leadership. Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Ind.), who voted for the bill, said he “didn’t know anything about (the vote) until today.”

“In a free society you have to be very careful as to taking away the civil liberties of the American people” Rokita said. “Even if the bill is well intentioned and the law is well intentioned it can be used against innocent people. So that was my concern.”

Republicans will bring the extensions back to the floor under simple majority rules, where if tonight’s vote is replicated, it would pass easily.

Last week, House Republicans launched an indefensible effort to redefine rape to exclude certain rape victims from abortion coverage. Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) then followed up with the Protect Life Act, a bill that would “give doctors the green light to let pregnant women die if they have a life-threatening condition and need an emergency abortion.”

Not to be outpaced by their federal, anti-women counterparts, GOP lawmakers in states across the country are ginning up woefully ignorant abortion measures to mandate their anti-choice views on doctors and women. Whether through forcing a woman to hear heartbeats or see sonograms, making up imaginary data on race and gender, nullifying the Supreme Court, or redefining the state constitution, lawmakers in Ohio, Texas, Arizona, Florida, and Iowa intend to make this year the year they win their war against reproductive rights by any means necessary:

– OHIO: State GOP Rep. Lynn Wachtmann will unveil the so-called “Heartbeat Bill” today, the “first proposal of its kind” that “would prohibit women from ending pregnancies at the first detectable fetal heartbeat,” which can be heard “within 18 to 24 days of conception” and “in almost all cases by six weeks.” As NARAL Ohio pointed out, this bill targets “a point when many women don’t even know they’re pregnant.” Crafted by the right-wing group Faith2Action, the bill is being advertised via “heart-shaped balloons” and “a music video” with “a few fetuses appearing to keep the beat from inside the womb.”

– TEXAS: This week, the Texas Senate will consider state Sen. Dan Patrick’s (R) anti-abortion measure mandating that “pregnant women be shown an ultrasound of the fetus at least two hours before an abortion.” Physicians would be required to show the fetus’ dimensions, presence of limbs or internal organs if applicable, and –if audible – the fetal heartbeat. Similar provisions failed in 2007 and 2009 but two weeks ago, Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) “fast-tracked the sonogram bill by declaring it an emergency item” to allow early consideration. The bill’s author, state Sen. Dan Patrick (R) says the emergency designation is legitimate because “we have 80,000 abortions in Texas every year” and the emotional pain caused by this bill will inevitably compel “one out of five women” to bring the baby to term.

– ARIZONA: State GOP Rep. Steve Montenegro introduced two bills to criminalize abortions if they’re sought because of race or sex. The bill would slam doctors who “knowingly perform abortions for these reasons” with Class 3 felony charges. While neither Montenegro nor independent searches of state records provide support for his claims, Montenegro insists “that there are targeted communities that the abortion industry targets.” He even believes that “an abortion based on race would include situations where the parents are the same race as the fetus.” Arizona Department of Health Services does not collect information on fetus gender and only recently began asking about racial statistics. As of last week, Montenegro has yet to provide the “promised” statistics to support of his bills.

– FLORIDA: Ordained minister State Rep. Charles Van Zant (R-FL) recently introduced the Florida for Life Act, a bill that mimics Florida’s recent “fetal personhood” amendment which defines all human beings as persons “regardless of age, race, health function, condition of physical and/or mental dependency and/or disability.” The Florida for Life Act is “more overtly religious,” stating that “all life comes from the Creator and begins at conception.” The bill also states that the Supreme Court is unqualified to “determine, establish, or define the moral values” of Floridians and that the Constitution expresses no qualifications for states to “protect life in a manner consistent with the moral consensus of the people, and reflecting the peoples’ belief in a Creator.” The bill would not only prohibit induced abortions but would “punish abortion doctors as felons, should they violate the measures” of the bill.

– IOWA: Two Iowa Republican representatives are opposing a bill seeking to prohibit abortions after 20 weeks because “it doesn’t go far enough.” Because she feels the bill “would codify deaths of babies from zero to 19 weeks,” State Rep. Kim Pearson is “not willing” to support this legislation and will instead introduce her own bill “that would define life as beginning at conception” and effectively “end all abortions in Iowa.” GOP state Sen. Randy Feenstra is trying to push the marker with a bill to restrict abortions after the 12th week of pregnancy. If all else fails, a resolution to amend the Iowa Constitution to “define a person as starting from a single-cell human embryo” is now pending in the Iowa House.

These measures are certainly not the first efforts by pro-life lawmakers to change state law. Last year, a Kansas GOP lawmaker proposed levying a sales tax on abortions. Perhaps inspiring Texas, Oklahoma overrode a veto last year to enforce an ultrasound mandate with “no exceptions for rape or incest.” And a fetal personhood amendment like the one in Florida appeared on the Colorado ballot in 2008 and 2010 but was “decisively defeated.”

But the state-level efforts right out of the gate in 2011 implies a renewed motivation to blindly pre-determine what is already a difficult and deeply personal choice. A recent NARAL report counts a total of 15 states with anti-choice governments. Arizona has already introduced a “heartbeat” bill similar to Ohio and Texas, Georgia, and Oklahoma are watching its progress “closely.” With concerted attack on reproductive health coming both from the federal and state level, the GOP may just walk women’s rights all the way back before the Supreme Court protected them in 1973.

During a long rant against government-subsidized health insurance today on C-Span’s Washington Journal, Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) claimed that being uninsured is better than being on Medicaid — the federal government program that provides health care for low-income Americans:

CASSIDY: Medicaid, for your viewers who may not know this, is a combined federal-state program that insures, so to speak, the low-income folk. And it’s actually worse than the uninsured! So Medicaid, Medicaid patients in some cases have worse outcomes than patients who have no insurance whatsoever. Now, why that is is not understood, but what is known is there is a problem with the quality of the patients on Medicaid – the quality of health care for the patients on Medicaid receive.

Watch it:

Cassidy didn’t offer any specific examples of how Medicaid patients have worse outcomes than those who are uninsured. But it’s important to note that the uninsured population has a lot of young people who don’t consume health care, while the Medicaid population generally has more risk factors and is in need of coverage. Families USA has pointed out that Medicaid “is cost-effective” when compared to private health insurance. And there’s the obvious financial benefit of having government subsidized insurance versus private insurance, let alone no insurance at all:

Federal law limits how much people in Medicaid can be charged for their health care. For low-income people, this prevents costs from being a barrier to obtaining needed health care. Low-income adults with private health insurance pay more than six times as much on out-of-pocket costs than do low-income adults with Medicaid.

The recession has forced more Americans to rely on Medicaid than ever before. The Kaiser Family Foundation reported last September that Medicaid enrollment had jumped to 48 million, while USA Today’s analysis a month prior put the number at more than 50 million. “Virtually every Medicaid director in the country would say that their current enrollment is the highest on record,” said one industry expert.

Also, Americans like Medicaid. A 2005 Kaiser poll found that 74 percent consider Medicaid very important and most would oppose cuts to the program. A Zogby poll last month found that 65 percent of likely voters said “they oppose policies that resulted in cuts to Medicaid funding for nursing home care for America’s poor and elderly.”

At a public forum today, Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), the new head of the House energy committee, denied that climate change is manmade. Upton, who received $20,000 from Koch Industries in his most recent campaign, had called for a reduction in greenhouse emissions as recently as June 2009. Upton has now introduced legislation with Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) to overturn the scientific finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that greenhouse pollution threatens public health. This morning, Upton was pressed by National Journal‘s Ron Brownstein as to why the Upton-Inhofe bill describes climate change as “possible.” After repeated attempts to avoid the question, Upton finally explained his wide-straddling stance: he accepts that the planet is warming, but not that the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted by human activity are a cause:

I have said many times, and there was a report a couple of weeks ago that in fact you look at this last year, it was the warmest year in the last decade, I think was the numbers that came out. I don’t — I accept that. I do not say that it is man-made.

Watch it:

Upton then repeated the falsehood that “even if cap-and-trade had been enacted, it would not have changed the temperature by a tenth of a degree anywhere in the world.”

In reality, the Environmental Protection Agency has found that U.S. cap-and-trade would avoid several degrees of catastrophic warming. And 2010 was not just the hottest year this decade, but the hottest year in recorded history. This is why the National Academies of Science found last year that “climate change is occurring and is caused in large part by human activities” and that the United States should “act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Instead, tomorrow Upton will hold a hearing with several witnesses funded by Exxon Mobil and Koch Industries to praise the Upton-Inhofe pollution act.