Lawmakers joined with Tea Party leaders on Thursday to warn that revelations that the IRS had targeted conservative groups could portend further abuses of government power, specifically in the way in which President Barack Obama's health care reform law is implemented.

The Capitol Hill press conference, which featured frequent references to Obamacare, happened hours before House Republicans were to hold their 37th vote to repeal or replace part of the law.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Tea Party figurehead, argued that the IRS's efforts to single out conservative advocacy groups for additional scrutiny could lead to similar profiling in implementing health care reform.

"Could there potentially be political implications regarding health care, access to health care, denial of health care - will that happen based upon a person's political beliefs or their religiously held beliefs?" she asked, saying that asking such a question before the IRS scandal would not have been “reasonable," but that now it was.

"Will our most personal information be used to deny or delay access to health care? Or could it be possible that our sensitive information could be used to blackmail Americans or even potentially to embarrass Americans?" she continued.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., a Tea Party darling with presidential ambitions (and himself a physician) added: "I'm quite worried that your medical records now will be evaluated by the IRS that seems to have the ability and seems to have the penchant to use political persuasion and political oppo to search out political opponents."

He also said that while acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller’s resignation was a "step in the right direction," more heads needed to roll.

"Someone needs to be held responsible, someone needs to be imprisoned," he said.

Jenny Beth Martin, of the group Tea Party Patriots, suggested the IRS had political motivations for targeting groups like hers, despite the recently-released inspector general’s report which concluded no agents were driven by politics.

"Government agents have used the IRS as a weapon to silence speech, harass innocent Americans and perhaps sway elections," she said.

But despite the strong words against the IRS and the Obama administration, Bachmann and others shied from calling for Obama’s impeachment, as Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., did over the administration’s handling of the attack on the American diplomatic facility in Benghazi.

"We also don't want to jump to conclusions. We want to go where the facts lead us and we aren't interested in creating our own facts contrary to some of our federal agencies," Bachmann said, though she added many of her constituents in Minnesota ask her, "Why aren’t you impeaching the president? He has been making unconstitutional actions since he came into office."

"So I will tell you what I’m hearing from people back home," Bachmann said.

Updated 1:42 p.m. — A major staple of the Republican presidential nominating process -- the straw poll of Republicans at the Iowa State University in Ames -- could go by the wayside if Iowa's GOP governor gets his way.

Gov. Terry Branstad, who's currently serving his fifth term as governor of the Hawkeye State, told the Wall Street Journal that the straw poll was no longer relevant.

© Brian Frank / Reuters / REUTERS

Iowa Governor Terry Branstad speaks as U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack looks on during a news conference at the Iowa State Capitol March 28, 2012.

"I think the straw poll has outlived its usefulness,"Branstad told the paper. "It has been a great fundraiser for the party but I think its days are over."

The governor's comments earned a rebuke from the chairman of the state Republican party.

"I believe the Iowa Straw Poll is possibly the best way for a presidential campaign to organize (put in place county and precinct leaders & activate them) for Iowa’s First in the Nation Caucus," said A.J. Spiker, the party chairman. "I think it is detrimental for any campaign to skip the opportunity presented in Ames and I disagree with Governor Branstad about ending our Iowa Straw Poll."

Ronda Churchill / AP

Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, left, Indiana Gov.-Elect Mike Pence, center, and Republican Governors Association Chairman and Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell participate in the RGA Annual Conference on Nov. 15, 2012, in Las Vegas.

The straw poll has more often offered a glimpse of candidates' organizational strength in Iowa, which traditionally hosts the first nominating contest in a presidential contest, than a good predictor of the nominee. Candidates often spend thousands (if not more) on courting votes in the straw poll, hosting elaborate barbecues and musical acts in hopes of emerging from the event with a burst of strength.

But the winner hasn't always gone onto the nomination. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann won the straw poll this summer, earning a boomlet for her longshot bid for the nomination that fizzled weeks thereafter. Mitt Romney, the eventual Republican presidential nominee, didn't participate in the straw poll (though he stopped at the state fair during the same weekend); he lost the Iowa caucuses to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum by just a few votes, despite not having campaigned in the state.

"You saw what happened the last time," Branstad told the Journal. "I don’t think candidates will spend the time or money to participate in a straw poll if they don’t see any real benefit coming out of it."

The event was consequential -- in a negative way -- for former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who had been thought to be a major contender versus Romney for the GOP nomination. But after Pawlenty's campaign bet almost all of its chips on the Ames event, he ended his bid for the presidency.

Still, the event is a major fundraiser for the Iowa GOP, and future candidates looking to add some momentum to their own campaigns might elect to participate anyway in the straw poll, a bit of presidential pageantry dating back to the 1980 election.

Arizona Sen. John McCain (R) offered a personal and passionate defense of top State Department aide Huma Abedin in the face of conservative allegations that she is using her position in "unduly influencing" foreign policy in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood.

McCain called allegations that Abedin has ties through her family to the Muslim Brotherhood "sinister" in a rare speech on the Senate floor taking fellow Republicans to task.

"Rarely do I come to the floor of this institution to discuss particular individuals. But I understand how painful and injurious it is when a person's character, reputation, and patriotism are attacked without concern for fact or fairness," McCain opened.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann (R), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, led four other Republican lawmakers in writing a letter last month requesting that the State Department investigate whether Abedin, who is Muslim, has any ties through her family to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic political group that found success in recent Egyptian elections.

Jacquelyn Martin / AP

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Bachmann has expressed concerns about how Abedin, who is married to former New York Rep. Anthony Weiner (D), was able to obtain a security clearance.

McCain condemned these accusations as unsubstantiated.

"These sinister accusations rest solely on a few unspecified and unsubstantiated associations of members of Huma's family, none of which have been shown to harm or threaten the United States in any way," he said. "These attacks on Huma have no logic, no basis, and no merit. And they need to stop now."

McCain called Abedin a "friend" who is an "intelligent, upstanding, hard-working and long servant of our country and our government."

"Put simply, Huma represents what is best about America: the daughter of immigrants, who has risen to the highest levels of our government on the basis of her substantial personal merit and her abiding commitment to the American ideals that she embodies so fully," he added.

McCain picked apart the rationale of Bachmann and her colleagues, who wrote their June letter based on a report "The Muslim Brotherhood in America," produced by the Center for Security Policy.

"The letter alleges that three members of Huma's family are 'connected to Muslim Brotherhood operatives and/or organizations.' Never mind that one of those individuals, Huma's father, passed away two decades ago. The letter and the report offer not one instance of an action, a decision, or a public position that Huma has taken while at the State Department that would lend credence to the charge that she is promoting anti-American activities within our government."

McCain has spent time traveling with Abedin while she served as a personal aide to Hillary Clinton during Clinton's time as a senator from New York.

He ended his floor speech with a strong show of support. "I have every confidence in Huma's loyalty to our country, and everyone else should as well."

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann suggested she may wait to endorse whomever wins the Republican nomination in her first appearance Wednesday on MSNBC since dropping out of the presidential race.

"My decision’s already made. I’m on board with whoever the nominee will be, because I’m all in for defeating Barack Obama in the upcoming election," Bachmann said, adding later, "I just think it’s very clear that we haven’t seen any of the candidates make the final sale."

The remarks cast further doubt that Bachmann will make an endorsement in the coming weeks.

(A report in the Boston Globe that Bachmann was in “negotiations” to endorse Mitt Romney days before the Minnesota caucuses won pushback from the Congresswoman herself, who declared the story “completely false.”)

Asked whether her resistance to endorsing is a signal that the field is weak, Bachmann deferred, drawing a parallel to 2008.

"We saw Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton literally giving each other black eyes,” Bachmann said.
 
“It wasn’t pretty four years ago, on the Democrat side of the ticket,” she continued, adding, “I think once our side decides on a candidate, then we’ll lock arms, we will be all-in together.”

The payroll tax cut fight also came up during her interview.  Bachmann reiterated her opposition to the cut, insisting as she often did during her run that the money was drawn from a “social security trust fund.”

“When you go to the general treasury and open the door to that vault, only moths and feathers fly out.  There’s nothing in there.  We’re broke,” Bachmann said.

Bachmann dropped out of the race on Jan. 4, one day after finishing last among the Republican candidates competing in the Iowa caucuses.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann made light of some of her campaign trail missteps in her first major speech since dropping out of the presidential race.

Bachmann said that running for president is "really one series of humiliations after another" in remarks to Republican activists gathered for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

“I learned three things when I was running for president,” Bachmann continued.  “First of all, I learned where John Wayne was born. That's very important. And then second, I learned the day that Elvis Presley was born. These are vital issues to our republic. And third I learned, never forget the three things that you learned.”

The first two things she learned were facts she famously got wrong along the way -- the third thing, of course, is a reference to what Texas Gov. Rick Perry forgot during a CNBC debate in Michigan last November.

But Bachmann did not seem to have forgotten many of the themes that undergirded the last few months of her presidential run, which were marked by daily attacks on President Obama’s foreign policy.

“Without a shadow of a doubt he world is a better off without bin Laden and without Gadhafi," Bachmann said, before adding: "These are tactical successes that don't begin to compare with the mess Barack Obama has made of the Middle East.”

Reviving a major theme of her candidacy, Bachmann attacked President Obama for the events of the Arab Spring, arguing that Obama should have defended Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak against the movement.

“Obama failed to stand by Mubarak,” Bachmann said, “and that helped fuel the revolution in Egypt, and it led to a regime that was based on Sharia Law, with 72 percent of the seats in the lower house in Egypt now occupied by the Brotherhood.”

Turning to another theme Bachmann hit often on the trail, she hit Obama for the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, and the planned drawdown in Afghanistan.

“Only Obama could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and call it success,” Bachmann said.

Almost one month after abandoning her presidential campaign, Michele Bachmann today announced that she will be running for re-election to Congress in Minnesota.

Word of her plans, first conveyed to the Associated Press during a Jan. 25 interview, puts to rest questions about what Bachmann’s career would hold after her run for the GOP presidential nomination catapulted her into national headlines.

Bachmann was elected to Congress in 2006, during the year that Democrats swept congressional elections and took over majority of the US House and Senate.

Citing “the absolute need” to repeal the federal health-care law and the banking regulations embedded in the Dodd-Frank legislation, Bachmann declared in an email today that she is “not done."

“Our campaign [for president] changed the focus of this presidential election.”

Meanwhile, Bachmann’s presidential campaign still carries debt up to $447,000, according to 4th quarter numbers released Tuesday.

Bachmann ended her campaign on Jan. 4, one day after finishing in sixth place in the Iowa caucuses, last among the candidates competing in the state.

TAMPLA, FL -- Michele Bachmann's campaign is denying the Minnesota congresswoman has either endorsed or ruled out supporting a candidate following the circulation of a fraudulent news release in South Carolina.

A release, which appears to show the Minnesota congresswoman denouncing Newt Gingrich two weeks after Bachmann ended her campaign, was distributed by email to voters in South Carolina yesterday.

The campaign's former communications director, Alice Stewart, issued this response: "The Bachmann for President campaign has not issued an official statement regarding an endorsement of any current candidate in the GOP race ahead of the South Carolina primary. Any information found to the contrary is inaccurate."

NBC News has obtained a copy of the release, which was printed on campaign letterhead and made to look like a news release sent on behalf of the candidate herself. 

The release promises an endorsement in the "coming weeks," but notes, "through this exhaustive process of consideration, it was strikingly obvious that one candidate could not be less acceptable to be our Party's nominee." 

Describing a candidate lacking "poise, experience and moral fibre," the release names Gingrich, calling him "desperately flawed."

If nothing else, the incident demonstrates that Bachmann's voice is valuable enough to counterfeit, and it marks the second time in a week that former top aides have complained her name is being misused.

On Friday, campaign manager Keith Nahigian directed a lawyer to ask South Carolina radio stations to take down an advertisement he said created the false impression she is endorsing the former House speaker.

MIAMI, FL –- An email posing questions about traditional Christianity’s view of the role of women in political life is the subject of a bitter complaint today by a former member of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign. 

The email was sent last summer from the personal account of an Iowa staffer working for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. It was first reported Friday by the Des Moines Register.

The email reads, in part: "Is it Gods highest desire, that is, His biblically expressed will... to have a woman rule the institutions of the Family, the Church, and the State?"

Reached by telephone Saturday, the author of the email -- Jamie Johnson -- told NBC News his email has been "blown way out of proportion," and does not represent official campaign correspondence.  

Johnson, who is a pastor at a central Iowa church, is Santorum’s “Iowa coalitions director,” tasked with building support among the state’s evangelical community.

"I was sharing my personal reflections with a friend through my private email account -– not the campaign account," Johnson said. “They were reflections on over 25 years of formal, theological study” based in “classical Christian doctrine.”

But the email, passed this summer from its recipient to a member of the Bachmann campaign, is raising questions about attitudes inside the evangelical voting bloc over which Bachmann and Santorum competed in the run-up to the Jan. 3 caucuses.  

Santorum finished a close second in the contest; Bachmann finished in last place among those competing and dropped out of the presidential race the next day.

Peter Waldron, who lives in Florida and worked nationally Iowa as Bachmann’s “faith outreach coordinator,” says that “misogyny was a serious issue in Iowa” -- and argues that “medieval attitudes” are to blame, in part, for his candidate’s weak showing.

He is today demanding an apology from Santorum over a “sexist strategy” in the state, sending a press release only hours before Santorum won the support of a key meeting of national evangelical leaders.

Citing Johnson’s email, Waldron makes this charge: “Evangelical surrogates [for Santorum] promoted the idea that a female cannot be an elected official or a commander-in-chief.”

(Waldron, who has managed Christian outreach for Republican candidates since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 run, received a rash of press himself this summer, over his 2006 arrest in Uganda on terrorism charges.  He tells NBC News he was there on a Christian mission, and his arrest had to do with his opposition to the sitting president's effort to force a third term through the legislature.)

Native observers of political and religious life in Iowa are more measured, but acknowledge a debate over Bachmann's gender emerged in churches after her presidential fortunes slipped.

"I know of pastors who were supporting her before the [Aug. 13] straw poll, and then I saw pastors try to tell everybody when she was plummeting in the polls that we needed male leadership," says the Des Moines-based, nationally-syndicated radio host Steve Deace, who is supporting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for president.

"She was trying to get elected as a woman," Deace adds about Bachmann. "And I think in general people in both parties are more comfortable voting for men. Just ask Hillary Clinton." 

MIAMI -- Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann’s campaign for president may be over, but top aides are still rushing to her defense.

Bachmann’s former campaign manager, Keith Nahigian, directed a lawyer Friday to write South Carolina radio stations to ask them to stop playing an advertisement he says is funded by the group Winning our Future, a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich.

Nahigian says the ad, apparently called "Bachmann," uses archival tape of the former candidate praising Gingrich in order to create the impression she's endorsing him.  (Winning our Future did not immediately respond to an email from NBC News.  The ad does not seem to be available online.)

According to a transcript provided by Nahigian, Bachmann says of Gingrich's time as speaker of the House, “He made an indelible mark that literally changed the United States,” adding, “he was almost better known than our president during those years.”

A narrator says: “Michele Bachmann is right.  Newt helped change history once.  He can do it again.”

Nahigian says the audio dates to the 2008 Republican National Convention, in St. Paul.  Bachmann, running for re-election in her nearby district, invited Gingrich to speak at a fundraiser for her campaign.

“Congresswoman Bachman has not endorsed Speaker Gingrich, nor any other candidate for the Presidency,” the letter from Bachmann's lawyer reads.  “Your station must fulfill its responsibility to operate in the public interest and cease airing [Winning our Future’s] radio advertisement immediately.”

The Bachmann campaign ground to a halt a little more than a week ago.  Nahigian, back from a brief vacation, calls this brewing fight “small little stuff,” though “ironic."

“The words that came out of her mouth [at the 2008 event] were written by his staff, of how to introduce him,” Nahigian says, of Gingrich.  “They’re not even her own thoughts.”