He's good enough, he's smart enough, and doggone it, I really, really like him

Here's the context: Republican Senators Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma, the state where he says the school bathrooms are overrun with lesbians) and David Vitter (R-Diapers), are the co-sponsors of a Republican protest measure that would require Congress to go on the public health insurance option if it passes. Never mind that Congress is ALREADY on a public option, but that's beside the point. We already know what reality is where Republicans are concerned. The point of this whole thing is relying on the clubbiness of Congress to force Senators to say "Oh, no...that's good enough for the little people, but not good enough for us."

Enter Senator Sherrod Brown:

Whenever Democrats talk about their proposed federally backed insurance plan, or public option, in the ongoing health-care debate, critics pipe up. If you think this public option is so great, they say, why don't you demand that all members of Congress go on it, too?

Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown says that's a fine idea. And this morning, he forced his way onto a Republican amendment saying as much, becoming a co-sponsor of a Republican protest measure that would require Congress to go on the public option if it passes.

Fact is, Republicans pushing the amendment are using it as a form of rotten eggs to hurl at their opponents. But Brown, a key sponsor of the public option legislation, likes those eggs.

Brown has refused to participate in the government's array of health insurance plans for 17 years, saying they are more generous than the coverage choices that many other Americans get. Why should Congress get such sweet coverage? he asks.

[snip]

Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma didn't seem to be in a hurry to bring on Brown as a co-sponsor. Coburn had Republican co-sponsors, but Brown's office says the Ohio Democrat never could get a commitment to be added, despite nine calls from his staff to Coburn's staff over the last week.

So this morning, Brown stood on the Senate floor and forced the matter. He asked for unanimous consent to be added as a co-sponsor to the amendment. This procedure is usually reserved for issues of little controversy because it bypasses a roll-call vote.

But in an open, televised proceeding, who's going to oppose a senator's genuine desire? So fellow senators granted Brown's wish. Next time someone asks why members of Congress won't go on the public option if it's so darn good, look for Brown to push his way into the fight and say, Yeah, buddy, you're darn right.

Nice work by Sen. Brown. I take back everything I thought about him back when Chuck Schumer forced Paul Hackett out of the race in which he won that Senate seat.

It would have been nice if Al Franken had been the one to call the Republicans' bluff, but he did a nice job of signing on. I especially like him reminding David "Hookers" Vitter of his own 34-year marriage. A nice touch. If we wondered how Franken would integrate comedy into his Senate work, here you go.

More like these, please.

Someone will become Senator from Massachusetts. Who will become the liberal lion of the Senate?

I keep getting weepy over the death of Ted Kennedy. It isn't that I'm one of those Kennedy cultists. I happen to come from perhaps the only home in America that had liberal parents in the 1950's and 60's who never forgave John Kennedy for defeating THEIR chosen political deity, Adlai Stevenson. But I keep going back to Kennedy thundering "What is it about working people that drives you so crazy?" In doing so, Kennedy ripped the façade off the empty Republican blather about "ordinary Americans." It's as if someone had the guts to point out that in using the words "kill" and "Obama" in the same sentence, Republicans were advocating the murder of the President. I'm not so sure that had Kennedy still be around, he wouldn't have done that. But I look around and I wonder which of the genteel milquetoasts who populate the Democratic side of the Senate is going to have the guts to do this? Who is out of the pockets of lobbyists enough to take over?

Oh, there are Democrats whose hearts are in the right place; people like Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and Barbara Boxer, and a few others. Perhaps Al Franken may rise to the occasion, though Franken is far less liberal than those who demonized him when he was doing the "Oy Oy Oy Show" on Air America would believe. And so far Franken has taken his status as most junior member of the Senate quite seirously, not rocking the boat. It's hard to imagine him becoming the next Paul Wellstone, but it's too early to say.

One candidate for Lion that I'll be watching is Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown. Now I have to admit, I was skeptical about Brown for quite a while, after Chuck Schumer and yes, Rahm Emanuel, tag-teamed to strongarm the highly charismatic Paul Hackett out of the race that put Brown in the Senate. It was an ugly start to Brown's Senate career, given that he'd said he wouldn't run and then changed his mind, with the help of Messrs. Schumer and Emanuel, after Hackett decided to run. But lost in that whole foofarah, which was in many ways an indication of how Emanuel "does business" and how he is so able to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, is that Brown had, and still has, a reliably liberal voting record.

Brian Buetler at TPM reports on a conversation he had with Sherrod Brown this week, in which Brown doesn't unequivocally say that he would vote against a bill that's simply a windfall for insurance companies, but he did get to the crux of the matter:

"I don't know for sure if I would support it with out a public option but it would be hard to get there.... We're not going through this to write some namby pamby bill so we can check a box and say we did health care reform."

Now all that said, Sherrod Brown is no Ted Kennedy. For one thing, he comes across as not quite the sharpest knife in the drawer. For another thing, at times he has a disconcerting facial resemblance to the most recent former occupant of the White House. For a third thing, as one wag noted, his speech cadences are often more reminiscent of Billy Mays than of Ted Kennedy:

Perhaps Brown seems like pretty weak soup after the thundering oratory of Ted Kennedy and that of that other warhorse of the Senate, Robert Byrd (cue Barry or someone like him to post a comment about Robert Byrd's long-ago KKK association, which he has long since repudiated; yes, he's that predictable). But I'm not sure they even make orators like that anymore. The question is whether Sherrod Brown or Al Franken or someone else will pick up the mantle of liberalism not as something to be ashamed of, but as something that brought most of the programs that Americans, even though currently shrieking at Town Halls about "Obamacare", like and take for granted.