WASHINGTON – Federal judges, including those of the Supreme Court, would be barred from hearing legal challenges involving the Pledge of Allegiance under a bill the House of Representatives passed yesterday.

The Pledge Protection Act passed largely along partisan lines, on a vote of 247 to 173, after an emotional debate in which today’s judiciary was compared to 19th-century judges who upheld slavery.

Supporters said the proposed law is necessary to prevent courts from taking the pledge out of the classroom and to stop “activist” judges from removing the words “under God.”

The bill will “prevent federal judges from legislating from the bench and striking down the historic and heartfelt meaning of the Pledge of Allegiance,” said Rep. Peter Sessions, a Republican of Texas.

Congress does not have to “suck in” and “live with” constitutional pronouncements from even the highest court, said the bill’s author, Rep. Todd Akin, a Republican of Missouri.

Critics said the vote was an election year gimmick setting a “dangerous” precedent of attempting to limit judicial power, a precedent that could eventually extend to other controversial issues such as abortion and school prayer. Congress is already considering measures that would bar federal courts from considering the legal definition of marriage and the public display of the Ten Commandments.

Rep. Vito Fossella, a Republican of Staten Island, was the only member of the New York City congressional delegation to vote in favor of the bill.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat of Manhattan, warned that lawmakers were “playing with fire” by tampering with the constitutional order.

Lawmakers narrowly defeated an amendment that would have excluded the Supreme Court from the bill, on a vote of 202 to 217.

Rep. Judy Biggert, a Republican of Illinois, said she supported the wording of the pledge but could not vote for a bill that diminished the Supreme Court’s constitutional role.

“This unprecedented restriction of the Supreme Court’s authority would violate the basic tenet of checks and balances within our system of government,” she said.

The American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement that, if enacted, the bill would “effectively close federal courthouse doors to religious minorities, parents, schoolchildren, and others who seek nothing more than to have their religious and free speech claims heard before the courts most uniquely suited to entertain such claims.”

The bill’s author, Mr. Akin, brushed aside the constitutional concerns.

“There is all kinds of legal mumbo-jumbo that people might want to talk about, but let us not make the issue too complicated,” he said. “… It is about the fact that we have activist judges saying that kids cannot say the same pledge that you and I have said for the last 50 years.”

The Missourian introduced the bill last year after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that a California school district could not require children to the recite the pledge containing the words “under God.” That decision was reversed by the Supreme Court, which found that the atheist father who brought the case did not have standing to sue on behalf of his daughter. The decision left the constitutional question to be resolved in future litigation.

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that a Pennsylvania law mandating recitation of the pledge violated the Constitution because it violated students’ rights to free speech.

As a coequal branch of government, Congress has an obligation to defy court decisions it disagrees with, said Mr. Akin, citing the 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court upheld the legality of slavery.

“Out of my state … came the Dred Scott decision on slavery. I would not sit here and say, oh, I have to sit here and live with it. They are wrong, just as you and I can be wrong,” he said of federal judges.

Opponents said the debate was part of an election-year effort to excite conservative voters.

“The Republican spin machine is in full gear, in my view, to the lower common denominator, to reinvigorate some who may not be as invigorated as the majority party would wish that they be,” said Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Democrat of Florida. Mr. Hastings, himself a former federal judge – he was impeached and removed from the District Court bench – called the bill “un-American.”

Mr. Sessions conceded that the vote was in part symbolic.

“It is important for every member of the House to place themselves on record as sharing the values of the majority of Americans in our country that believe that American is one nation under God and that the opinion of a few liberal judges in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals can never change that fact,” the Texan said.

The executive of the American Humanist Association, a group that rejects theology, Tony Hileman, said the bill amounted to “the imposition of religious ideology.”

The bill states: “No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or decide any question pertaining to the interpretation of, or the validity under the Constitution of, the Pledge of Allegiance … or its recitation.”

A companion bill is pending in the Senate.