The Tennessee General Assembly was scheduled to approve a measure banning insurers from offering abortion coverage within the exchanges today, but lawmakers rescheduled the vote for Monday after Democratic members expressed concern that the bill could conflict with the federal Hyde amendment and deny abortions to women in cases of rape, incest, or if the life of the mother was in danger. The bill, HB 2681, seeks to “ensure that Tennessee tax money does not go to pay for abortion as provided in the new federal health care plan.”

Lawmakers in at least four states — including Tennessee, Oklahoma, Missouri and Mississippi — have all introduced bills “that would generally block abortion coverage in exchange plans, while two other states — Arizona and Kansas — are seeking to impose wider restrictions. Arizona has a bill that would blog local governments from providing abortion coverage for their employees and Kansas would “prohibit insurance plans from generally covering abortion.”

“Both abortion opponents and groups favoring abortion rights say they expect to see a growing number of state-level fights over the issues raised by the federal law,” which says states can choose to “prevent plans offered through their exchanges from covering abortion altogether.”

I’ll try to follow these debates in some detail, but from listening to today’s session in the Tennessee general assembly, I’m not too optimistic that pro-choice lawmakers will be able to block these amendments. For instance, Democrats in Tennessee didn’t object to the measure as much as they pressed the sponsor to clarify that it would not prohibit women whose life was in danger or those who became pregnant a result of incest or rape, from obtaining an abortion. They didn’t argue that the federal health law already prohibited public dollars from funding abortion services or maintain that insurers that choose to cover abortion will have to segregate public and private funds.

Of course, if these bills are successful, women would only be able to purchase abortion coverage in the unsubsidized (but newly regulated!) individual health insurance market or, if that’s unavailable, they would have to pay the full cost of an abortion, which is about $500 for a first-semester pregnancy.

In March, Lee Fang pressed Mitt Romney on the constitutionality of health care reform, asking the former Massachusetts governor if he believed that the individual mandate at the center of his own health care reform effort was, in fact, unconstitutional. Romney refused to answer, telling Fang, “You know I’ve got a long discussion that I could give you on that, but I’m in too harp hay of a hurry right now but I think we have that on the site.” “I think I’ve answered that the best way I can right now which is it’s a big topic and I’m happy to discuss it at length but I just can’t do it in the hall going to the elevator,” Romney said as Fang followed him down the hallway of the National Press Club.

Fortunately, Romney finally had enough time to dig into the intricate legal underpinnings of the constitutional question during his book tour in New Hampshire:

In an interview at the Union Leader this morning, Mitt Romney said President Obama’s health care plan was an unconstitutional violation of the 10th Amendment.

Romney has been saying that a key difference between his Massachusetts health care reform and President Obama’s reform is that his was a state plan and Obama’s is a federal plan. In speeches in New Hampshire last night and this morning, he defended his plan (as he has before) by noting that the 10th Amendment reserves powers to the states that are not explicitly granted to the federal government…

In a scheduled interview this morning, I asked Romney if Obama’s individual mandate unconstitutional in ordering individuals to purchase a commodity. “I’m not enough of a judge,” he said. “I think it’s unconstitutional on the 10th Amendment front.”

Who new it was actually that simple? The Washington Posts’ Greg Sargent points out the absurdity of trying to argue that a mandate is only unconstitutional if the federal government imposes it, but it’s also worth noting that Romney’s answer makes little legal sense. He doesn’t say that government can’t mandate the purchase of insurance — after all, his own health care law does that — only that it’s a right reserved to the states. But, of course, that’s not how the Supreme Court sees it. The Court has decided that the Commerce Clause grants Congress the authority to regulate economic activity among the states. And, since federal laws are supreme to the laws of the states (under the supremacy clause), states have to heed the new mandate requirements. The tenth amendment only provides that states retain powers that are not granted to Congress.

Romney was also asked if “any other federal programs currently in place violate the 10th Amendment, he said, “I don’t have any I can point to at this stage.”

On Tuesday, Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) brushed aside his attorney general’s opinion that the health law does not violate the tenth amendment, and announced that he would join a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of reform. “The federal government is now requiring citizens under penalty of a fine to buy a good or a service, and we think that’s an unprecedented overreach by the federal government into the lives of individual citizens,” he said.

But as Newsweek’s Andrew Romano points out, Pawlenty believed that “federal mandates within the boundaries of the law” as recently as last year. In October 2009, during an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, Pawlenty seemed to agree with his attorney general when he claimed that the courts have said that the federal government can supersede the power of the states to regulate commerce:

STEPHANOPOULOS: And Governor Pawlenty, let me begin with you, because after the speech on Thursday night, the president says he’s going to get this done. After the speech on Thursday night, you suggested perhaps invoking the Tenth Amendment, which reserves powers to the states, if indeed this does pass. What exactly are you saying? There is a movement to actually nullify health care if it passes?

PAWLENTY: Well, George, in the legal sense, I think the courts have addressed these Tenth Amendment issues, but more in the political sense, in the common sense arena, we need to have a clear understanding of what the federal government does well and what should be reserved to the states. [...]

STEPHANOPOULOS: So just to be clear, are you suggesting that any parts of the plan as the president has laid it out are unconstitutional?

PAWLENTY: Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a legal issue. I was raising it as much as a practical matter, that there are some things that the federal government shouldn’t do, doesn’t do well, and should leave to the states.

Watch it:

Romano observes that Pawlenty’s decision to sue the federal government is part of a broader effort to align himself with the Tea Party movement ahead of the Republican presidential primaries. As Stephanopoulos noted, Pawlenty has flirted with challenging the constitutionality of reform since September. “Depending on what the federal government comes out with here, asserting the 10th Amendment might be viable option, but we don’t know the details,” the governor speculated on a conference call with right-wing activists.

In fact, Pawlenty is now so eager to appeal to the conservative base, he attended yesterday’s rally with Sarah Palin and Gov. Michele Bachman (R-MN) and “bought the domain name BachmannRally.com and then redirected traffic to his own site.”

Mitt Romney continues to struggle with questions about why he wants to repeal a health care law that is so similar to the health reforms he signed in 2006 as Governor of Massachusetts, particularly since he used to argue that RomneyCare should serve as a template for national reform.

In October of 2009, Romney urged Democrats to use the Massachusetts law as a model to expand coverage. “We have found that we can get everybody insured without breaking the bank and without a public option,” Romney told CNN’s Sanjay Gupta. “Massachusetts is a model for getting everybody insured in a way that doesn’t break the bank, doesn’t put the government in the driver’s seat and allows people to own their own insurance policies and not to have to worry about losing coverage. That’s what Massachusetts did,” he said.

But since federal reformers adopted Massachusetts’ individual mandate and standard benefit provisions (among many others), Romney has found himself in the awkward position of having to defend his biggest legislative accomplishment while simultaneously attacking its federal twin. Yesterday, during a book signing in New Hampshire, Romney said that Massachusetts is not a model for coverage expansion:

“Had they brought the federal bill to my desk when I was governor, I’d have vetoed it,” Romney told an audience of 150 yesterday at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College in Manchester…”We solved a problem in the state with a state answer,” Romney said. “We didn’t have the federal government come in and intrude on the rights of states.”…Romney said the federal government created its plan without learning from Massachusetts or any other state. “It shouldn’t have been put in place without experimentation,” Romney said.

Incidentally, Romney used the 2009 interview — at that point, he was too focused on criticizing the public option to worry about the similarities hit — to berate Democrats for not using Massachusetts as a model. They did, and now he’s pretending that they didn’t.

Placing himself squarely in the “repeal and replace” camp of the internal Republican divide over how to respond to the new health care law, Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) appeared on Fox and Friends this morning to argue that repeal is possible. Jindal scoffed that anyone would consider keeping the bill, arguing that repeal was the obvious solution in the states. “Only in Washington would they debate whether we should try to repeal this. Of course we should, repeal this.” Jindal exclaimed. “Now is it going to be hard? Absolutely. But It’s not impossible.”

“Certainly we need to replace it. Nobody is arguing for the status quo when it comes to health care,” Jindal added, before offering three “bipartisan” proposals to improve the status quo:

JINDAL: Republicans have offered good, bipartisan ideas, things like making insurance portable across state lines, across jobs. Internet posting of prices and outcomes. Refundable tax credits to make health care more affordable. What we don’t need is this massive expansion of Medicaid…Here in my state of Louisiana, there is legislation in our legislature in a bipartisan basis, for example, to help young adults continue their family coverage. We’re not saying we want to go back to what health care was like before this bill passed. we are saying, however, is that we suggested bipartisan reforms.

Jindal first introduced his bipartisan solutions last year, when at least 9 of his 10 proposals were already part of health reform in one way or another. Now, all three of his ideas are in law. Americans can buy health care across state lines if their state forms a compact with other states, hospitals are required to post prices and outcomes online and individuals and families between 133% and 400% of the federal poverty line will receive credits to purchase coverage from the exchanges.

Incidentally, Jindal also supports the so-called Louisiana purchase provision, which increases the federal government’s contribution to Louisiana’s Medicaid program (it was about to fall because the state’s post-hurricane economic surge temporarily “boosted per-capita income that’s used to measure Medicaid payments”). Jindal personally lobbied in support of the increase in funding and on November 20th issued a statement in which he said, “the (health care) bill is awful, but it’s unfair to criticize Sen. Landrieu or the rest of our delegation for fighting to correct this.”

He is now proposing repealing all of these provisions and replacing them with very similar reforms. Only in Louisiana…