I’ve refrained from reporting on every single shocking amendment passed in the House’s “How to Remake a Government in 3 Days” roundelay, but this one merits a little attention. Mike Pence’s amendment to defund Title X funding for Planned Parenthood – essentially a piggy-back on those doctored videos from Live Action – passed this afternoon. However, it was mostly along party lines:

We don’t have the official roll call yet, but the vote was 240-185. There are 241 Republican members of the House and 193 Democrats. So fewer than 10 Democrats voted for the amendment. That represents more than the shrunken size of the pro-life Democratic caucus. It signals that Planned Parenthood has not bled Democratic support since the new campaign against it began in mid-January, with Live Action’s undercover sting videos. Compare that to the 2009 vote to defund ACORN, when a majority of the 255 Democrats — 172 members — fled from the ACORN scandal like Wisconsin legislators and voted to strip funding.

If that holds in the Senate, we’re likely to see this quickly removed. At least two Senate Republicans – Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins – wouldn’t go along with that, and probably not Lisa Murkowski, either. And outside of Ben Nelson, I can’t really think of any Democrats who would go along. Not even pro-life Bob Casey voted for the Stupak amendment, and this is a much broader restriction on family planning and women’s health.

Senate Democrats are pretty confident about this.

“Yes,” Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.), said when asked whether abortion rights supporters have enough votes to nix Pence’s effort. “There’s plenty for people not to like,” in the House GOP’s bill, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), told reporters, saying that the family planning cuts were just a particularly egregious example. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), agreed, and said he hoped “the opposition [to the cuts] will be bipartisan.”

Later, in an interview with Mother Jones, Planned Parenthood head Cecile Richards confirmed that the organization believes it can win Republican votes to restore the funding, which can’t be used for abortion but pays for birth control, cancer screenings, and basic health care for millions of poor women. “We’ve taken this vote before,” Richards said, referring to past Senate votes on family planning funding. Richards noted that Maine GOP Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins have voted for family planning dollars in the past, and said she hoped that Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who had a solidly pro-abortion rights voting record in the House, would also support restoring the money. Planned Parenthood also believes that Senate Democrats with mixed records on abortion rights will vote to restore family planning funding, Richards said.

Of course, none of the measures in the House CR will pass, per se. The bill is going nowhere, leading the country toward a government shutdown if nothing is done by March 4. So who’s to say what one funding piece will go this way or that? This all needs to be negotiated out.

UPDATE: Jerrold Nadler had a pretty righteous speech on this today, making the point that the amendment was an unconstitutional bill of attainder. An excerpt:

“If Planned Parenthood or anybody else is doing terrible things and ought to be punished, that is up to the courts. If, indeed, Planned Parenthood is trafficking with sex traffickers, let them be prosecuted. If, indeed, Planned Parenthood is doing anything illegal, let them be prosecuted. Let the organization be prosecuted. Let the individual employees who are doing these things be prosecuted at law. That is our system. But you don’t punish an organization because they are doing something of which you don’t approve.

“Now, if you want to say we don’t think that there ought to be any contraceptive services in the United States and therefore we are going to have no Title X funding, the CR does say that. I don’t agree with it, but it is constitutional. But, to say that if we have Title X funding, if we have maternal services funding, none of it can go to Planned Parenthood, it can go to somebody else, but not Planned Parenthood, that is a legislatively enacted punishment because Planned Parenthood is or is allegedly doing things of which you don’t approve.

“Now, I heard a lot at the beginning of this Congress about how we have to make sure that we adhere to the Constitution. This is a bill of attainder, because it is a legislatively enacted punishment of a named organization because that organization is doing things, or is allegedly doing things, of which we don’t approve.