Watching the Senate debate health care late Sunday night and into the first hour of Monday, several things struck me as I waited to hear those remarkable words, “On this vote, the Ayes have Sixty….”
How exhausted they looked, Tom Harkin’s Christmasy green-and-red tie and vest combo notwithstanding.
How much the Democrats (who are perfectly capable of their share of boilerplate and rhetoric) seemed to really care. And how much they miss Ted Kennedy.
How I’m not sure I ever heard Harry Reid speak quite so much from the heart as when he described Caleb, a boy in Nevada, born with a birth defect, who outgrew his artificial legs, only to be told by his insurer that he didn’t need new ones.
How much I wondered what was in the hearts of sometime renegade Republicans like John McCain, who had fought for a bipartisan patients bill of rights in the 1990s (along with Ted Kennedy and John Edwards) and now was repudiating legislation that would give more patients more rights? Including the right to be a patient.
How Robert Byrd felt, so frail at 92, being pushed in a wheelchair into his beloved Senate chamber for a 1 am vote after a blizzard? Despite his frailty, did he manage to convey, verbally or with one of those piercing glances he mastered when he led the Senate, what he thought of Tom Coburn, who urged American to “pray” that something happened to one of the Democrats so they missed a key vote.
How would the public see this a month or two from now? Would Americans take a big sigh of relief as it sinks in that they wouldn’t have to worry about losing their insurance if they lost their job? That their insurance wouldn’t find an excuse to drop them if they got sick? That they wouldn’t face a bottomless pit of financial insecurity if they got seriously ill? Or have the enemies of reform managed to inject so much fear that it dampens the hope?
And how nervous I was as the Senate clerk intoned each name for the vote. This has not been a predictable process, and we have seen all too well we have some unpredictable senators.
And then it was over. The Ayes had sixty. And now we have to do it again. And again. And then on to conference. And then again.
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