clapped her hands as she left the House floor late Saturday night.
"That was easy," the speaker said with a smile.
It wasn't. She had just delivered a promise decades of her predecessors
failed to bring home, harnessing her uncommon focus, vote-counting acumen
and consensus-building skills to bring tens of millions of Americans a giant
leap closer to having health insurance coverage with a 220-215 roll call.
"Somebody asked me if this was a victory for [President] Barack Obama. It's
not. This victory belongs to her," said House Rules Committee Chairwoman
Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.). "As far as I know she never sleeps nor eats."
The bill's fate, for now, rests across the Capitol in the hands of Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). But with Saturday's vote, Pelosi proved
yet again she is the able master of a Democratic Caucus that is enjoying its
greatest political and legislative success since at least the beginning of
the Clinton administration and arguably since its legislative heyday in the
mid-1960s.
Democrats, including Pelosi, view the push for expanding the government's
role in the health care system as a new plank in the social justice platform
constructed with Civil Rights, Voting Rights, open housing and Medicare laws
enacted during Lyndon Johnson's presidency, when Democrats held similar -
and at times even larger - majorities in the House.
"You, Madam speaker - and the leadership - we thank you for theextraordinary
leadership which you have given us in bringing us to the point where we are
today," Rep. John Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who's dean of the House,
said on the floor Saturday night. He was praising a woman who helped strip
him of his chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee less than
a year ago and once backed a primary challenger against him in Michigan's
15th District.
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