At last, a victory

It's 1:00 am, and I just got home from the Capitol, where I sat in the gallery for over five hours as the House debated and then passed the health care bill. There were moments of soaring rhetoric, there were moments of low comedy. My personal favorite was when one speaker compared the bill to the failed Soviet experiment of a planned economy. Since the result was preordained, and no one's mind was going to be changed, it seemed as though it took an awfully long time for it to get done. Yet there is something majestic about seeing one of the great issues of the day debated publicly, for anyone who is interested to watch, and then seeing the elected representatives of the people vote.

Nancy Pelosi was greeted by a roar from the Democrats when she rose to speak in favor of the bill. She and the rest of the Democratic leadership deserve enormous credit for bridging the differences between the House and Senate bills.

Will the bill do all that its proponents claim it will? Almost certainly not, just as it certainly won't wreak all the havoc its opponents warn against. But it will establish a principle--that everyone is entitled to a way to pay for the health care they need--which I hope will be hard to defeat in the future.

Another roar went up as vote number 216 appeared on the electronic tally. I would have had goose bumps, but they were too tired to raise up.