Left In Lowell

I didn’t think of it this way…but David is so right. Brown’s win for the Senate race is exactly the reason we have health care on the verge of passing (well, the Senate bill passed and signed, and the reconciliation to come to fix the Senate bill so the House would vote for it).

No, the biggest irony is that, had Martha Coakley won, we most likely would not yet have a health care bill, and we might never have gotten one. As long as Democrats controlled 60 votes in the Senate, they (including the President) seemed hell-bent on getting all 60 to vote in favor of it rather than simply end-running the filibuster rule and passing a bill via — *gasp* — majority vote. That gave us painful negotiations with Joe Lieberman; it lost us the public option; it gave us the “Cornhusker kickback” and other atrocities. And, had the Senate and House bills gone to a conference committee, we would have seen the same endless drama play out again on the conference report, with the end result far from certain.

But all of that changed when Scott Brown won. With his win, the possibility of getting 60 votes vanished — and with it, the need to do so.

So on top of my post thanking Rep. Tsongas for her vote for health care reform…I want to thank Scott Brown for winning the Senate seat and getting us have health reform, as well.

I guess who’d a thunk the Dems would get some balls after the loss? But they did, and it’s thanks to the Brown win and the loss of 60 Senate votes. In fact, I suspect this isn’t the last we’ll hear about the “upperdown vote” that Republicans were so loudly crying for under Bush and are now crying because Dems have the gall to ask for one…