With skittish House Democrats reluctant to ratify the heavy-handed compromises in the Senate health care bill such as the reviled Nebraska-only Cornhusker kickback, Pelosi is beguiled with a parliamentary gambit that would avoid such an awkward vote. Under a congressional sleight-of-hand called "deem and pass," House approval of fixes in the Senate bill (including rescinding the Cornhusker kickback) would be considered identical to actually passing the politically troublesome original Senate legislation.

If you are confused at this point -- and who can blame you -- here is a career tip: Do not expect to ever be a congressional parliamentarian.

The political appeal of this tactic for House Democrats in dicey re-election fights is that they could claim with a "Who me?" straight face that they never voted for the Senate bill. Under the finger-pointing "you did it too" playground rules that govern Capitol Hill, Democrats can also persuasively argue that Republicans employed the same procedural shortcut dating back to the days when Newt Gingrich was speaker. On Thursday, by a 222-203 vote, the House tabled a Republican amendment that would have banned the use of deem and pass for Sunday's expected showdown vote on the health care bill.

So while the Rules Committee has yet it to make it official, the smart bet is that the House leadership will sidestep a direct up or down vote on the Senate health care bill. Under the short-term thinking that dominates Washington, employing deem and pass qualifies as clever politics -- especially if it provides a way for Pelosi to pick up an extra vote or two.

But, in truth, this maneuver could be the prelude to a Pyrrhic victory for Barack Obama and the Democrats. The reason: The last thing that the president needs is to give the Republicans another reason to challenge the constitutionality of the health care legislation before the conservative Supreme Court.

There already exists the likelihood of a long shot legal challenge to the bill's mandate that individuals either obtain health insurance (often with the help of federal subsidies) or pay a fine for not having coverage. That small legal risk has always been unavoidable since an individual mandate is built into the framework of the Obama health care bill. For there is no way to come close to achieving universal coverage (the revised Obama bill would protect 95 percent of the legal residents of America, according to the Congressional Budget Office's Thursday update) without an individual mandate or a government-run health care program.

In contrast, there is no substantive reason other than political gamesmanship to risk Supreme Court review over the House's probable use of deem and pass. In an Op-Ed article in Monday's Wall Street Journal, conservative Stanford University law professor Michael McConnell argued that deem and pass "may be clever, but it is not constitutional." That is not the mainstream legal view since traditionally the Supreme Court has been reluctant to decide purely political questions like the validity of the internal rules of Congress.

The problem is that the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, is fast earning a reputation as the most political court since the 1930s. In January, the Roberts Court in a 5-to-4 decision in the Citizens United case abandoned a century of legal tradition by overturning the campaign finance laws that banned direct corporate involvement in political campaigns. When Obama denounced the decision in his State of the Union Address as opening "the floodgates for special interests...to spend without limit in our elections," Justice Samuel Alito was caught on camera mouthing the words, "Not true. Not true."

Then just last week, Roberts speaking at the University of Alabama Law School, expressed his dismay over Obama's remarks at the State of the Union. "The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court -- according to the requirements of protocol -- has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling," the chief justice said in response to a question. And Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, has just gone public as the president of a new nonprofit group, LibertyCentral, designed to "serve the big tent of the conservative movement."

Yes, a counterargument can be made on each of these points, with the exception of the Alito pantomime. The Citizens United decision can be viewed narrowly as a ratification of the conservative doctrine that corporations have individual rights in the political debate. Roberts has a point when he complains that the Supreme Court is expected to make a symbolic appearance at State of the Union addresses that have become almost as political as national conventions. And Ginni Thomas, who was a conservative activist before her husband was appointed to the Supreme Court, is just the latest Washington spouse to implicitly argue that she should not give up her own political rights because of a retrograde interpretation of conflict of interest.

But taken collectively, these recent events underscore the aggressively conservative tilt of the Supreme Court. It is worth recalling that three current sitting justices (Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas) were part of the 5-to-4 majority in the most political decision in modern Supreme Court history - Bush v. Gore,which effectively ended the 2000 election recount.

In their zeal finally to pass health care reform, do the House Democrats really want the Roberts Court to rule on the constitutionality of deem and pass? For that matter, do House Democrats really believe that this legislative shell game will inoculate them from Republican attacks over the health care bill? With deem and pass, Democrats will be, in effect, arguing, "I voted against it (the Senate bill) at the same time I voted for it (with the fixes)."

At its core, the health care bill is designed to reinforce the social safety net by protecting Americans from unnecessary financial risks in obtaining health care. It seems strange to risk the legitimacy of the health care bill by passing it in a way that all but guarantees a trip to the most conservative Supreme Court since the 1930s.

Through the years, they've also paid a price for their outspokenness, and in fact are currently under investigation by the Vatican for what Rome's lead inquisitor said were "certain irregularities" in their obedience to the church as well as what he called "a certain 'feminist' spirit."

Frankly, I think the sisters -- and the church -- could use a little feminist spirit. When I was growing up, the nuns in my parish cleaned the priest's house -- a responsibility on top of their day jobs teaching and running the school. In seventh grade, when I asked our lay teacher why, if Jesus washed his friends' feet and the priests were the living representative of Jesus, they didn't wash the nuns' floors instead of the other way around, she just shook her head.

Although we have had the Catholic sisters to thank for running inner-city schools and hospitals in neighborhoods that are not exactly overserved, the gratitude from the guys has not always been obvious. But perhaps the silver lining in the sisters' lack of political clout is that this has left them freer to speak truth to power.

To me, what we see in two of the biggest news stories right now -- health care reform and the German priest sex abuse scandal tapping right on the door of the Vatican -- are two illustrations of the importance of women's voices in the church. If health care reform passes, it will be in no small part because Catholic nuns respectfully but plainly made themselves heard.

Whereas in case after case of clerical sex abuse, we hear how sisters -- like the ones who were busy cleaning the priests' house -- were not heeded when they tried to make known their concerns about inappropriate behavior. As a columnist in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's own daily, put it last week, more women in decision-making roles in the church might have helped remove the "veil of masculine secrecy" that covered up abuse cases. (The writer was, no surprise, a woman.)

On health care, the bishops still have the opportunity this week to do what they are so often accused of not doing -- listening to women. But will they take this opportunity to change that, um, habit?

It's not looking good: The bishops continue to argue that the Senate version of the proposed health care reform "expands federal funding and the role of the federal government in the provision of abortion procedures.'' That's in direct contradiction to the nuns, who represent tens of thousand of sisters, many of whom are care providers. They sent a letter urging members of Congress to "cast a life-affirming 'yes' vote when the Senate health care bill...comes to the floor of the House."

Sister Carol Keehan, who heads the national association of Catholic hospitals, stated that while she shares the concern of the bishops, she does not share their conclusions: "We said there could not be any federal funding for abortions, and there had to be strong funding for maternity care, especially for vulnerable women," she said. "The bill now being considered allows people buying insurance through the exchange to use federal dollars in the form of tax credits and their own dollars to buy a policy that covers their health care. If they choose a policy with abortion coverage, then they must write a separate personal check for the cost of that coverage." To her, this does not add up to federal financing of abortion.

As Politics Daily's religion writer, David Gibson, has reported, the bishops aren't budging "despite the decision of their onetime allies, the national association of Catholic hospitals, to endorse the legislation, and in the face of mounting evidence that the basis of their opposition -- a belief that the bill would finance abortion -- is faulty." ("If anything," Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law and policy at George Washington University, told Gibson, the Senate language "bends over backwards to make it clear that there is no abortion funding." And a new study published in the latest New England Journal of Medicine shows that abortion rates declined during the first two years that Massachusetts implemented a near-universal health coverage program much like the nationwide plan currently before Congress.)

It would be hard for the bishops -- hard for anyone, for that matter -- to reverse themselves on a position they've taken so publicly and argued so passionately -- and I hope that that's not what's keeping them from following the sisters' lead on health care. But as they have been pushing for health care reform for decades, they wouldn't be doing the nuns' bidding. They'd just have to be willing to take "yes" for an answer.