Thank You Harry Reid
There’s been a lot of appreciation for Nancy Pelosi in the past couple of days, and rightly so. Along with Barack Obama, Pelosi maintained her calm after Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts while almost the entirety of the rest of Washington was losing its collective mind. Her insistence on holding the line and her clear headed sense of how to achieve her goal quite literally saved the entire effort. Her caucus gave her a standing ovation as she entered the chamber before the vote Sunday night, and it was a richly deserved one.
But it occurs to me that, through all of this, Harry Reid is being significantly short-changed. This seems particularly unfortunate to me, since Reid is so often disparaged as hapless by progressives. But consider what exactly Harry Reid accomplished; without a single vote to spare, he moved the same bill the House just passed through the Senate, securing the vote of every single member of his caucus. Senators from Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu to Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders were brought on board the same broad healthcare reform bill, as was th vindictive Joe Lieberman. In many ways, this was nothing short of a miracle, an unprecedented legislative accomplishment, considering the newly minted culture of unified and unbending minority opposition in the Senate.
So without diminishing what Nancy Pelosi, or Barack Obama, accomplished in passing healthcare reform, let me extend a hardy thank you to Majority Leader Reid, for a feat that has never been accomplished before, and may well never be accomplished again in the Senate. Just as reform arguably couldn’t have passed without Obama or Pelosi, it’s hard to say anyone else could have succeeded as Reid did.
Tags: Harry Reid