If you thought the health care debate was contentious enough, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Today, top Senate Democrats expressed their intention on passing the president’s health care reform package at any cost, even if that means circumventing normal legislative rules, thus inviting a flurry of Republican parliamentary tactics designed to grind the chamber’s business to a halt in retaliation.

FOX News reports today:

The Republican response? Don’t even think about it.

This wouldn’t be the first time Democrats threatened to use the budgetary work-around. The idea has been floated in the past as a potential measure of passing legislative reforms central to the president’s agenda: on climate change, on stimulus, and now, on health care. And it just might work.

Imagine a scenario in which Reid rams through ObamaCare using the nuclear option: how, then, can Republicans respond and do so effectively? Herein lies the challenge for McConnell and his colleagues on the right.

New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg claims to have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of stall tactics ready to apply should the Democrats enact their reform via reconciliation. Surely, some retaliatory measure seems justifiable, considering Republicans’ harsh resistance to the bill(s) in the first place. But other than pissing off the Democrats and temporarily halting their agenda, what more would such actions accomplish? They certainly won’t stop the bill from being approved. And there is no doubt that the White House, in conjunction with the DNC and their friends in the media, would begin a massive PR campaign designed at painting the Republican Party as childish, whiny, and ineffectual. Add to that the fact that Republicans themselves used reconciliation on a number of occasions during the Bush years (most notably to pass the Bush tax cuts), and you have a recipe for political disaster.

Remember the “party of ‘no’” attack line Democrats used against Republicans hellbent on opposing the Obama express at every turn? Revise that liberal meme to describe Republicans as the “party of ‘hell no, and to hell with America’” and you have an idea of the negative narrative that inevitably will be thrust upon the right should they hit back by deploying their arsenal of legislative obstructions.

Such a response can only be met with bad press, negative impressions, and doom. Unless… Unless the Republicans have the right of mind to concentrate their revenge on turning public opinion against “oppressive” one-party regime rule in Washington and by focusing the efforts to stop ObamaCare at the state, not the federal level.

In fact, the fight against the largest proposed government intrusion in American history has already begun. State senators in Georgia have put forth a constitutional amendment to the Georgia Constitution that asserts the state’s right to “protect” its citizens from ObamaCare under the 10th Amendment.

It’s all part of a push within some among the conservative right to, in effect, invalidate any potential health care reform bill by pursuing its own nuclear option: nullification. The D.C. Writeup’s Josh Eboch wonders as much:

Such a “groundswell” would be unprecedented to say the least, but what Eboch eludes to — and what most certainly is ttrue — is that any move to combat and/or repeal ObamaCare that works will have to begin at the grassroots level. Should the Democrats fail at producing a truly bipartisan reform package and move forward with their plans to use the nuclear option, Republicans would be wandering into treacherous and fruitless political territory by opposing it in any other manner. Perhaps they would do best to fight radical change with radical change, not crybaby politics.