Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry wears a grim reaper costume as he leads a protest against the House health care reform bill.

Randall Terry is giving a tour of his office, a small room on the ground floor of the $1.3 million home he rents in northern Virginia. The room is packed. Every inch of wall space is taken up by books or personal treasures–stones “liberated from places where Muslim armies destroyed Christian churches,” the complete works of Winston Churchill, the complete works of Theodore Roosevelt, small metal busts of the men themselves. Terry reaches to a top shelf and grabs one volume of Muhammad al-Tabari’s history of Islam. “It’s one of the definitive histories,” says Terry. “I believe that Islam is a threat to the world, and I want to address it.”

Getting ready to leave the room — he has to finish a paper he’s writing about “Augustinian realism” — Terry grabs for something else. It’s a small plastic shark with a flashlight attached to its head, a gift from Terry’s daughter. He flips on the light and tries out his best impression of Dr. Evil from the “Austin Powers” trilogy of slapstick comedies.

“C’mon, people!” he says. “Gotta have the data! Can I please have a shark with a frickin’ laser beam?”

The man who personified the anti-abortion rights movement of the 1980s and 1990s loves to kid around. It disarms reporters, and it wins over the activists who use the lower level of Terry’s home as the base for Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex. (In Latin, it roughly means “Insurrection Until Death.”) In May, People for the American Way released video of Terry closing a press conference on the murdered abortionist George Tiller — Tiller “reaped what he sowed,” said Terry. In response, Terry convened a new press conference where he served Guinness and chicken wings.

For several years, especially after Terry served as the spokesman for the parents of the late Terri Schiavo in 2005, his personality and his antics, as well as his financial and legal decisions, led him to be ostracized from the movement. That’s fine by him — he’s suing the current leadership of Operation Rescue, his original organization, and without much prompting he’ll call leaders of groups like Americans United for Life “a bunch of harlots.” While they deride him or distance themselves from him, Terry is capitalizing on the conservative uprising against President Obama and congressional Democrats. When cameras show up to cover a Tea Party or a health care protest, Terry and his activists are there. If reporters pretend his protests don’t exist, Terry’s small staff churn out their own video and post it on YouTube.

“I think there is a certain element of the media that does not want us to be seen,” said Terry. According to him, the current and unexpected political trouble that pro-abortion rights activists have found themselves in — chiefly the Stupak Amendment that prohibits abortion funding in a public health care plan — is the result of ostentatious and unyielding pressure from activists like him. The newfound political role of Catholic bishops? That’s their attempt to undo the damage they did themselves by not opposing Barack Obama in 2008. “We’re not here for a place at the table. We’re here to take the table and smash it, turn it into firewood.”

Sometimes, rhetoric like that gets Terry in front of the camera. The office walls of Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex are decorated with newspaper clippings–mostly front pages–about Terry and his successes. More files of newspaper and magazine covers are stacked on bookshelves. Terry and his activists draw a clean line between that kind of coverage and coverage in “the ghetto press,” the Catholic and anti-abortion rights media, whose readers presumably made up their minds about this kind of activism years ago. Their strategy–a combination of slapstick skits, counter-protests, and sit-ins–has increasingly won the attention of liberal blogs hungry for images of conservatives gone wild. On August 25, Terry and three other members of Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex attended an town hall meeting in Reston, Va. The media coverage went almost exactly the way they wanted. Before the event began, Terry and the others acted out a skit in which Terry, playing a doctor, teamed up with a Barack Obama impersonator to “murder” babies and an old woman. Once inside, Terry shouted down Howard Dean before being forcibly removed from the venue.

“Our goal was to keep Dean from talking,” said Terry. “And it worked! He didn’t talk!”

Missy Smith, a longtime activist who has taken a large role in Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex, recreated the slogans that got them kicked out. “‘Obama! Abortion is murder!’” said Smith. “They said they heard it in the back of the room. It was very cool.”

After that, the skits got wilder. Terry would dress up as the grim reaper, pleading with passersby to have abortions. Joshua Reading, a 28-year-old seminary graduate who recently joined the flock, recorded a Halloween-themed YouTube video asking activists to create effigies of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “burning in hell.” It was so successful that it was condemned by Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. It even won respect from Jill Stanek, a prominent anti-abortion rights activist and Terry critic. “While the other side scoffs at Terry,” she wrote, “and we pro-lifers back away in embarrassment, the day may actually come when Pelosi and Reid find themselves in hell and remember this. Then it won’t be so funny.”

On October 29, TalkingPointsMemo posted four and a half minutes of footage featuring Terry and other protesters acting out a skit mocking Reid and Pelosi. On November 5, after joining the “Super Bowl of Freedom” held on the Capitol steps to rally opposition to the Democrats’ health care reform bill, the activists marched over to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office and tore up pages from the bill. Capitol police arrested them one by one; it was all captured for their YouTube account.

“We told security that we were going to deliver the bills to [Rep.] Ron Paul [R-Tex],” laughed Missy Smith. “It’s incredible that we got them through.”

Smith admitted, with some regret, that the protest got little media attention after the tragedy at Fort Hood took over the headlines. But with every media hit they get, Terry’s activists are absolutely convinced that their approach, an aggressive approach, is working.

“We make the national news, outside of the ghetto press,” said Reading. “Our message reaches everyone.”

Andrew Beacham, a young, bearded activist who has been ejected from four of President Obama’s speeches–including his University of Notre Dame commencement speech and a health care event in Maryland–was just as adamant. He came into Terry’s fold after a disappointing stint as a Republican activist and a Tea Party organizer in Indiana. Suiting up and heckling the president of the United States, he said, made him aware of how “in history, there are always people who are willing to step up and be the tip of the spear.” Shouting down the president of the United States is more effective than nearly any form of public protest, said Beacham, especially when the president is hesitant about how to respond.

“The teleprompter doesn’t tell him how to respond to heckler,” laughed George Offerman, an activist who’d brought his home-brewed beer to Terry’s home.

The media savvy among Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex activists comes across immediately. They talk about Gallup polls that show support for legal abortion dropping, Politico stories about Democratic infighting, and Onion videos that make President Obama look like a fool. Near the end of their meeting with TWI, they watched episode nine of Terry’s self-produced television series “Insurrecta Nex.” Filmed in a small Ohio studio before an audience of Terry’s supporters–Offerman, Reading, and Terry’s wife Andrea all make appearances–the episodes are stylistic echoes of Glenn Beck’s Fox News show. Terry tells jokes and tries on funny voices as he moves around the camera, retelling American history for lessons on how to “stomp out legalized child-killing.” One episode about the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea Party closes with Terry literally “dancing on the grave” of “Roe v. Wade.”

All of the media training, and all of the new interest from reporters and liberal blogs, will play a part in Terry’s next project. In 2010, Operation Rescue-Insurrecta Nex activists will run for federal office in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Terry ran for Congress in 1998, mounting an anti-tax, economic conservative campaign with almost no talk of abortion. “Everyone in the district knew me as Mr. Pro-Life,” Terry told TWI. “I wanted them to know that I could represent them in Washington on something more than dead babies.” The plan for 2010 is just the opposite: It’s to get TV ads running in the beltway, with brutal imagery of aborted fetuses beaming into voters’ homes.

“We’re going to re-define the pro-life debate in the 2010 election,” said Terry. “If we spend $500,000 or $3 million dollars on media in these races, the media will be apoplectic. They will not be able to ignore us.”

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED, that the Republican National Committee identifies ten (10) key public policy positions for the 2010 election cycle, which the Republican National Committee expects its public officials and candidates to support:

(1) We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s “stimulus” bill;

(2) We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run healthcare;

(3) We support market-based energy reforms by opposing cap and trade legislation;

(4) We support workers’ right to secret ballot by opposing card check;

(5) We support legal immigration and assimilation into American society by opposing amnesty for illegal immigrants;

(6) We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges;

(7) We support containment of Iran and North Korea, particularly effective action to eliminate their nuclear weapons threat;

(8) We support retention of the Defense of Marriage Act;

(9) We support protecting the lives of vulnerable persons by opposing health care rationing and denial of health care and government funding of abortion; and

(10) We support the right to keep and bear arms by opposing government restrictions on gun ownership; and be further

RESOLVED, that a candidate who disagrees with three or more of the above stated public policy position of the Republican National Committee, as identified by the voting record, public statements and/or signed questionnaire of the candidate, shall not be eligible for financial support and endorsement by the Republican National Committee.

Ahead, on my right, I saw the Alaska Right to Life (RTL) booth, where a poster caught my eye, taking my breath away. It featured the sweetest baby girl swathed in pink, pretend angel wings fastened to her soft shoulders.

“That’s you, baby,” I whispered to Piper, as I have every year since she smiled for the picture as an infant. She popped another cloud of cotton candy into her mouth and looked nonchalant: Still the pro-life poster child at the State Fair. Ho-hum.

Well, I still thought it was a nice shot, as I did every time I saw it on its advertisements and fund-raiser tickets. It reminded me of the preciousness of life.

It also reminded me of how impatient I am with politics.

A staunch advocate of every child’s right to be born, I was pro-life enough for the grassroots RTL folks to adopt Piper as their poster child, but I wasn’t politically connected enough for the state GOP machine to allow the organization to endorse me in early campaigns.

Time and again, Palin uses her large family for political purposes, and then complains that they’re “off limits” when she decides they’re under attack. We’ve seen it with the use of her son Trig–Palin put him on national TV at the 2008 Republican National Convention, and has occasionally accused liberals of wanting to kill him. We’ve seen it with Bristol Palin, whose pregnancy became a national story, and with Track Palin, whose military service Palin has referred to again and again. But it seems like Piper Palin’s star turn for Alaska Right to Life was the first political deployment of a Palin family member.

“I don’t think that it’s a threat at all,” Brown said Monday night during an appearance on MSNBC. “There aren’t more than four or five Democratic senators that I would say are anti-choice. There are at least, I think, two Republican senators who are pro-choice.”

“Again, on an up or down vote — Harry Reid’s not going to put the Stupak language in the bill, I’d be certain,” Brown added. “Then the Republicans will try to amend it into the bill, and they will be unsuccessful; they won’t even get close to 50 votes.”

The “Stupak language” is reference to an amendment offered by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) explicitly prohibiting exchange plans from covering abortions, even in cases when patients’ premiums are set aside for that purpose. Pro-choice House Democratic leaders were forced to include the provision in order to pass their health reform bill earlier this month, but liberal lawmakers are vowing to kill the reform bill if the language remains.

If Brown is right, then the collision between the House bill with the Stupak language and the Senate bill without it would take place during the conference negotiations between yet-unnamed leaders of both chambers.

On a great number of bills, it’s the Senate that’s been the bottleneck in recent years. It’s worth noting, though, that it was an abortion amendment that killed last year’s attempt to improve the Native American health care system — a bill that passed the Senate, but was never taken up in the House for the recognition that the abortion provision would likely survive.

Having invested so much time and political capital in health reform this year, Democrats won’t have the same option of simple abandonment. Instead, they’re likely going to have to come up with some delicately nuanced Stupak compromise.

Last week, it was liberal Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) predicting that anti-abortion lawmakers in the upper chamber wouldn’t be able to rally the 60 votes needed to pass an amendment to health reform legislation restricting abortion. This week, it’s an influential moderate Democrat warning that the health bill won’t pass without such a provision. Roll Call reports:

“What is clear is that for this bill to be successful, there can be no taxpayer funding for abortion,” Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) said, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Conrad said he did not know whether the Senate would ultimately adopt the restrictive language that the House passed last week, which dictated that any new government-funded health insurance option cannot pay for abortions. But he said that some kind of abortion restriction is necessary for a bill to get through Congress.

The debate in the House is following a similar storyline, with conservative Democrats insisting that the abortion restrictions be included, and no small number of liberal Democrats hinging their support on their absence. With neither side appearing ready to back down, you can look for Democratic leaders to perform a very delicate scalpel job during conference negotiations to reconcile the two bills — something that would allow both sides to claim victory.

“I find it hard to believe,” said Kilburn. “It’s terrible.” He compared the RNC’s plan unfavorably to what he’d done in Ohio, paying individual claims for employees, preventing them or the state from buying into plans that covered abortion.

Still, while Schmidt has taken money from the RNC to finance some tough re-election battles, Kilburn passed on a chance to criticize her. “She’s been a very faithful pro-life vote,” he said. “She’s a principled supporter of the right to life. Hopefully this is just an anomaly that slid through the cracks.”

In an interview with Detroit News, the 57-year-old Catholic warned that “the other side is playing with fire,” if they try to remove his amendment during later negotiations with the Senate.

If they are going to summarily dismiss us by taking the pen to that language, there will be hell to pay. I don’t say it as a threat, but if they double-cross us, there will be 40 people who won’t vote with them the next time they need us—and that could be the final version of this bill.

Of course, there are about 40 abortion-rights supporters in the House who are vowing to kill the bill if the Stupak language stays.

There are countless perks that come with being part of the congressional leadership. Resolving stalemates like this is not one of them.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the Democrats’ chief deputy whip in the House, said that she and other pro-abortion rights lawmakers would work to strip the amendment included in the House health bill that bars federal funding from subsidizing abortions.

“I am confident that when it comes back from the conference committee that that language won’t be there,” Wasserman Schultz said during an appearance on MSNBC. “And I think we’re all going to be working very hard, particularly the pro-choice members, to make sure that’s the case.”

House Democrats put themselves into a pickle over the weekend when they accepted an amendment, sponsored by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), prohibiting abortion coverage, not only in the public plan being proposed in the House health reform bill, but also in the subsidized private plans found on the newly proposed insurance exchange. Stupak and other moderate Democrats want assurances that no federal funds will go to provide abortions, and they’ve hinged their support for the overall bill on the inclusion of that ban.

Liberal lawmakers in support of abortion rights, however, are also vowing to kill the overall bill unless the Stupak language is removed. One side will have to give, or the entire health reform effort goes up in flames.

Although House liberals voted for the bill with the amendment to keep the process moving forward, Rep. Diana DeGette (Colo.) said she has collected more than 40 signatures from House Democrats vowing to oppose any final bill that includes the amendment — enough to block passage.

“There’s going to be a firestorm here,” DeGette said. “Women are going to realize that a Democratic-controlled House has passed legislation that would prohibit women paying for abortions with their own funds. . . . We’re not going to let this into law.”

And the White House thought the public option was going to be the highest hurdle …

Right up until Saturday, passage was still in doubt due to resistence from conservative-leaning Democrats, who wanted stronger assurances that the proposal wouldn’t allow federal funding of abortions. Behind Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), those conservatives urged a floor vote on an amendment explicitly prohibiting such funding. They got it. And it passed 240 to 194.

That didn’t please the abortion-rights crowd — “to force insurance companies to deny a woman access to a legal procedure, would be a very disturbing step backwards,” said Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) just before he voted no – but it did clear the way to passage of the overall bill.

The Washington Post hits the highlights of the legislation:

Starting next year, private insurers could no longer deny anyone coverage based on preexisting conditions, place lifetime limits on coverage or abandon people when they become ill. Insurers would be required to disclose and justify proposed premium increases to regulators, and could not remove adult children younger than 27 from their parents’ family policies.

For the elderly, the group that has been most skeptical of Obama’s initiative, the House package would immediately offer discounts on prescription drugs and reduce a gap in Medicare prescription drug coverage, closing it entirely by 2019. Uninsured people who cannot get coverage could join temporary high-risk insurance pools, and unemployed workers would be permitted to keep their COBRA benefits until the public plan and insurance exchanges started in 2013.

Most Democrats — beginning with President Obama — hailed the bill’s passage as a watershed moment in the nation’s history. The proposal, Obama said, “would finally make real the promise of quality, affordable health care for the American people.”

Not all Democrats were convinced. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who voted against the measure, said it represents a giveaway to the same insurance industry that’s helped make the health care system dysfunctional. “We cannot fault the insurance companies for being what they are,” he said. “But we can fault legislation in which the government incentivizes the perpetuation, indeed the strengthening, of the for-profit health insurance industry, the very source of the problem.”

The ball is now in the Senate’s court, where lawmakers are expected to begin debate on their own enormous health reform proposal this month. That floor procedure, though, will take much longer than a single day.