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Senate Prepares to Vote on Health Care Bill Christmas Eve

By a majority vote — the last needed to end debate on the health care legislation — Democrats defeated a series of points of orders raised by Republicans, including one that questioned whether the requirement for all Americans to purchase health insurance was constitutional.

“Everyone… should be alarmed,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, said on the Senate floor while raising a point of order. “I feel duty-bound to question the constitutionality of this bill.”

South Carolina attorney general and gubernatorial candidate Henry McMaster, a Republican, said he and his counterparts in Alabama, Colorado, Michigan, North Dakota, Texas and Washington state will investigate whether the special provisions for Nebraska and other states that are included in the Senate health care bill are constitutional.

Nebraska, Florida, Vermont and several other states got concessions in what many Republicans say was a move by the Democratic leadership to buy the support of skeptical senators from those states.

By HUMA KHAN