If you go to the Senate website and take a look at the Senate’s Legislative Process guide (.pdf link), you’ll see pretty clearly exactly what happened last night . . . and why what happened last night is so extraordinary.

For starters, what happened last night was not a vote [ more . . . ]]]> There’s been a lot of debate on the topic (no pun intended, well, actually I think it’s a fantastic pun so, I’m going to use it!), but what exactly happened last night on the floor of the Senate vis-a-vis last night’s vote on Healthcare Reform is something worth investigating and explaining.

If you go to the Senate website and take a look at the Senate’s Legislative Process guide (.pdf link), you’ll see pretty clearly exactly what happened last night . . . and why what happened last night is so extraordinary.

For starters, what happened last night was not a vote to end debate per se — Rather, it was merely a vote to “lay the bill before the Senate”.  The bill had already been placed on the Legislative Calendar (that’s how we knew there was something going on last night), and the Majority Leader, in this case Senator Harry Reid, essentially made a “unanimous consent request to lay the bill before the Senate”.  The thing is — and this is where the exact details may or may not matter much — he either knew he wouldn’t get it (unanimous consent) or didn’t get it (again, unanimous consent).  That’s what led to debate . . and a vote . . on whether to officially “lay the bill before the Senate”.

What makes what happened last night extraordinary — and incredibly embarrassing to Republican Senators and the Republican Party as a whole in the long-term in my opinion — is that this step in the process, if you’ll excuse casual use of the term ’step’, is more a formality than an important step in the legislative process.

When you see things that typically occur by ‘unanimous consent’ you’re not looking at where the sausage is made.  And it’s certainly not where legislation is typically blocked – The actual acts of blocking legislation are a) never allowing something to come up for debate in the first place, b) preventing a final vote through Filibuster, which can be overcome in the Senate by a 3/5 vote for Cloture, or c) simply defeating a bill by an up-or-down vote.

That’s what happened.  And it explains in a roundabout way why they, meaning Democrat and Republican Senators, were debating all day yesterday — They were essentially debating on whether to debate . . . and that pre-debate process, which normally either never occurs or is bypassed by unanimous consent, was what they were doing.

And it’s also why I think — long-term — this will be so embarrassing to Republican Senators and the Republican Party as a whole.  What they were doing is saying they didn’t even want to talk about, i.e. debate, Healthcare Reform . . . and it’s that reality that I think will stick with voters should Healthcare Reform be passed (and ultimately judged worthwhile by the People).

As an aside, I’ve heard that if you go back and look into this exact part of the process the last time Healthcare Reform was attempted (under President Clinton) that this step actually did pass with unanimous consent — It was not until actual debate that reform fell apart.