There doesn’t seem to be any point in my pretending not to be thrilled by the historic House vote that sent health care reform legislation to President Obama.   

The victory is even more astounding when you consider that just a few short weeks ago health care reform was being pronounced dead upon the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, an event that denied Democrats the magic 60 votes they needed to get anything done in the dysfunctional Senate.

Credit for this amazing revivification must go to President Obama for finally—finally!–making an all-out push to get his signature issue passed into law.  Part of the reason that this took more than a year of agonizing twists and turns is that the President was too reticent for far too long.  Yet in the end, he can take pride in the historic victory.

Credit must equally go, however, to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who pulled off a feat that was deemed impossible—getting the House to ratify the Senate version of health care reform.

Despite the factionalization of Democrats in the House, Speaker Pelosi was able to make it happen.  Bravo, Madame Speaker.  Somehow your persuasiveness and doggedness did not allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good.

It is also so refreshing and even inspiring to see that in the end demagoguery and malicious falsehoods did not triumph.  We shouldn’t expect that the braying from the GOP will stop any time soon, however.  They see political gold in disseminating smears about the bill, but time will tell.

What this shows is that the President and Democrats need to continue pressing their story and the benefits of this bill for millions and millions of Americans.

I find it interesting that while the President used the insurance companies as whipping boys in the last stretch of his campaign to get the bill passed, those same insurers didn’t say ‘To hell with it.’  They protested the ‘vilification,’ all right, but somehow were able to keep focused on the balm of millions of new customers amid the public lashings.

This is by no means the radical bill that the right would have you believe. This is no government takeover of health care. If it was, there would be no place for private insurers in it. A government takeover would be something like Medicare for all and this legislation doesn’t even come close to that.

This bill may not be perfect but it goes a long way toward eliminating the stain of having America be the only major democracy in the world whose citizens were not guaranteed health coverage.  And for that, we can hold our heads higher.

It’s obvious from the fight that’s going on in Congress over whether to even form a Consumer Protection Agency and where to put it that American consumers have a major problem: Namely, that collectively they don’t have even one pocket deep enough for Congress to fit in.

This is in stark contrast to the banking industry’s pockets, which in their depth rival the fabled Mindanao Deep in the Pacific Ocean.  Now those are pockets, buddy. Pockets that are certainly large enough and deep enough to accommodate any number of senators and representatives, not to mention candidates for those revered offices.

You would think from the so-called debate that is going on that consumers all over this country were not the ones who were grievously injured by banks run amok during the lead-up to the cataclysm now known as the Great Recession.  That these same consumers weren’t taken to the cleaners by mortgage bankers.  That they didn’t have their clocks cleaned by predatory credit card practices that show how truly innovative banks can be.  That they weren’t harmed—and are still not being harmed—by the lack of credit availability from banks that are getting funds supplied by the Fed at next to no cost, but are using those same funds to trade for their own advantage.

And even more ironic, within the context of the wholesale amnesia that has seemingly taken hold of Congress since the events of September 2008, it is now the banks that are making the case that they need protection from being over-regulated!

So, what is one “compromise” shaping up to protect consumers?  It is to put an agency with that responsibility within the precincts of the Federal Reserve Board. 

Yes, the Fed, that same agency whose myopia during the buildup of the housing bubble rivaled Mr. Magoo’s.  Yes, the Fed, which back in those days of high-flying financial recklessness seemed to have no clue about what kind of exotics those banks it was supposed to be regulating were using—and just how awfully much they were on the hook for.

As a consumer myself I find the idea of expecting the Fed to take my side against the banks more than faintly ludicrous.

So what’s going on here? Is it that since they did such a bad job the last time around we owe them one more shot to get it right?

I’m with Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who has nothing but scorn for the idea.  He told Politico recently, “It’s almost a bad joke.”

Unfortunately it wouldn’t be the first time that a bad joke ended up as law.  Think of the Bush tax legislation that let the estate tax disappear for the year 2010 only to be resurrected at 2001 rates in 2011.  Or think about the Medicare prescription drug bill with its notorious doughnut hole.  I could go on, but you get the point.

So, the bottom line as I see it is that no matter what Sen. Richard Shelby, the banking industry’s white knight, thinks, it is consumers who need protection and they need an independent agency to make sure it happens.  No joke.

In an age where millions of people get off on conveying their thoughts in 140 characters (not words) or less, the art of crafting a one-word description of anything seems like a next logical step.

So if, after witnessing the U.S. Senate during the month of December, you were asked to describe that legislative chamber in one word, what would it be?

(Yes, I know, but no #@$&*($%*%*# words are allowed.)

For myself, I know what words would not be among those I would use to describe the Senate.  Here are a few of them: admirable, competent, inspirational, multi-tasking.

Some of the ones that might make my list: unbecoming, ridiculous, one-dimensional.

I think you would have to agree—no matter where you stand (perch?) on the political spectrum—that it was an undignified spectacle at best.  Is this how we as a country really want our Senate and the 100 potentates that grace it with their presence to operate?    

The most outrageous thing about the Senate is, of course, that 60-vote rule that came out of who knows where and lives on as a hallowed tradition.  I’m not going to belabor the point that nowhere in the Constitution–which, by the way, these Senators have sworn to uphold–does it say anything about having to garner 60 votes in order to move anything ahead.

But the outrageousness of the 60-vote rule became so clear as one or two senators were able to effectively dictate what large sections of the health care reform package would or wouldn’t contain.

You may well have appreciated Sen. Joe Lieberman’s threats this time around because they happened to play into what you wanted or didn’t want.  But you can rest assured that the time will come when another senator with delusions of grandeur takes a Lieberman-type position on something of vital interest to you.  Then we’ll see how much cheering you do.

And where did this apparent rule come from that you cannot consider a couple of pieces of legislation simultaneously?  Even kids in kindergarten are taught that you can use both hands at the same time.

Thus, we ended up with a result that no one really expected to actually happen.  Which is to say that the Senate never acted one way or another on the fact that the estate tax was due to expire for a year at the end of 2009, only to be reborn at 2001 levels in 2011. 

The fact that this cockamamie law was passed in the first place is a pretty big indictment of our legislators.  But all the while we kept telling ourselves that surely Congress would move to fix the year’s lapse.  They couldn’t possibly let it expire without doing something about it, we kept telling ourselves.  The possibility that they would do nothing—not act at all—was the stuff of late-night comedy shows, not something that might happen in the world’s greatest deliberative body.

It’s not like they didn’t have enough time to think about it. 

So now, the likelihood is some kind of retroactive patch, which in itself will create all kinds of weird problems. What if someone dies in that period when there is no estate tax, i.e., before retroactivity is voted on and approved?

The House at least took some action on the estate tax.  Similarly it has moved ahead on financial services reform, while the Senate tries to find its navel.

Maybe the problem is that there are too many millionaires in the Senate and they’ve just forgotten that we vote for them and then pay them to be there and get things done.

So, my one word to describe the Senate?

Dysfunctional.