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The House has passed one of the most far-reaching abortion bills in decades. But it's unlikely to ever become law.

By a mostly party-line vote Tuesday of 228-196, lawmakers passed the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act," which would ban nearly all abortions starting 20 weeks after fertilization.

"At 20 weeks maybe sooner, the baby feels pain," said physician and Rep. John Fleming, R-La., on the House floor. "And so I would just submit to you today Mr. Speaker; this bill is not just about abortion; it's about pain, it's about torture to that young life."

The contention that fetuses can feel pain starting at 20 weeks is hotly disputed. But it's been used as a justification to pass similar bills in multiple states over the past several years.

Bringing the federal bill to the House floor now was meant to capitalize on the publicity surrounding last month's murder convictions of Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, according to House Speaker John Boehner.

"After this Kermit Gosnell trial and some of the horrific acts that were going on, a vast majority of the American people believe in the substance of this bill and so do I," Boehner said at his weekly news conference.

Democrats, however, say there's one huge and glaring problem with the bill: It's unconstitutional.

"The bill bans abortions prior to 20 weeks," said Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, ranking member of the Constitution Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. "Since Roe v. Wade, it has been well-settled law that no bill is constitutional that bans abortions before viability, which is later than that."

Most experts agree that viability begins somewhere around 23 weeks, depending on how you count.

But Democrats use the abortion-ban bill to make a larger point, as well: that Republicans are continuing this year where they left off last year, attacking the rights of women.

"This bill is extreme, an unprecedented reach into women's lives, and a clear indication that the well-being of women in this country is not something that Republicans care to protect," said Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is also the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.

And Republicans, perhaps inadvertently, played into Democrats' hands.

During committee consideration of the abortion ban last week, the bill's sponsor, Arizona Republican Trent Franks, tried to fend off an amendment that would have provided an exception for victims of rape or incest.

In arguing against the exception, he said, "You know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy is very low."

Franks later said he was trying to say that most women who get pregnant as a result of rape have abortions well before they are six months pregnant. But the PR damage was done.

Republican leaders late last week decided not to let Franks manage his own bill on the floor. Instead, they turned to Tennessee Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a longtime anti-abortion voice. They also added exceptions to the bill for rape and incest.

But Democrats were outraged at the choice of Blackburn to handle the bill, because she's not even a member of the Judiciary Committee that considered it.

"And if that is not PR, I don't know what is," said Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., co-chairwoman of the House Pro-Choice Caucus. "And if that is not simply trying to fool you, I don't know what else that is."

On the other hand, Republican leaders couldn't have chosen a woman from the Judiciary Committee, because the Republicans on the panel are all male.

Still, the entire effort was likely all for show. The Senate is not expected to take up the bill. And President Obama issued a veto threat against it on Monday.

The furor over recently exposed government surveillance programs has posed an abundance of political challenges for both President Obama and Congress. Relatively unmentioned in all of this, however, is the role of the courts — specifically, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, and how its role has changed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Obama has said that there are tradeoffs between privacy and security in an age of international terrorism. But he emphasized that the two surveillance programs exposed this month were repeatedly authorized and reviewed by Congress, with federal judges "overseeing the entire program throughout."

Despite being overseen by judges, they are not examined in the way that a normal application for a search warrant is.

For decades, the government conducted warrantless wiretaps of people in the United States deemed to be a national security threat. But in 1978, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such warrantless searches unconstitutional, Congress passed legislation that created a special intelligence court to review government requests for warrants. The law was tweaked over the years, but the core of the court's powers remained unchanged for decades. If the government wanted to listen in on conversations or other communications in the U.S., it had to get a warrant from the foreign intelligence court based on individualized suspicion and probable cause to believe that national security was being compromised.

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There is one basic question that keeps being asked about the U.S. auto industry: Is it on the rebound?

"People ask a lot, is the auto industry back?" says Kristin Dziczek, a director at the Center for Automotive Research. "And it depends on what scale you want to look at."

U.S. automakers are adding jobs, but the gains are slower compared with recoveries from previous recessions.

Against all Vatican expectations, the pope's Twitter account in Latin has gained more than 100,000 followers in six months and continues to grow.

Followers are not exclusively Roman Catholics or Latin scholars, but represent a wide variety of professions and religions from all over the world. Some go so far as to claim that the language of the ancient Romans is perfectly suited to 21st-century social media.

Pope Benedict XVI launched the first papal Twitter account last December in eight languages, including Arabic. Soon, there were millions of followers.

Then letters started pouring in asking why the pope wasn't tweeting in the official language of the Vatican.

When the Latin account was launched in January, Vatican officials didn't expect more than 5,000 Latin nerds, that is, followers. But by May, it had surpassed Polish and was in a tie with German at more than 100,000.

Adducit nos Christus ut ex nobismet plus excedentes plusque ipsi dedamur aliis aliis famulemur.

— Papa Franciscus (@Pontifex_ln) June 4, 2013