New Massachusetts Republican Senator Scott Brown: Could We All Have Spoken Too Soon?

If you haven’t heard this past week, the Senate advanced the jobs bill. A $15 billion bill of tax cuts and highway spending advanced in the Senate on Monday. What makes this so surprising or significant? Maybe, it’s the fact that one of our new Republican senators voted with the Democrats, possibly setting the mood for the remainder of his term (or Ted Kennedy's term). What’s the mood? Unpredictability? So, you may have heard about the highly publicized Massachusetts Senate races that occurred in January, in which, Republican Scott Brown won in a surprising victory. He beat out the Democratic Massachusetts Attorney General, Martha Coakley. This shifted the always Democratic state of Massachusetts to an unanticipated Republican one. Therefore, Democrats lost their super majority vote in the Senate.


With Senator Brown’s election, President Obama, along with other Democrats’ were prompted to call for increased bipartisanship. Democrats did not know exactly how the votes would go now with Brown’s election. Would he be super conservative? Or moderate? No one knew what to expect. But, the former model's first vote in this jobs bill shows us that we may not know what to expect from this new Republican senator. We may have all just spoken too soon. Senator Brown joined four other republicans, 55 Democrats and two independents in a procedural hurdle that was to set up a final vote towards the end of last week. Brown said that the bill is not perfect but it would definitely help put people back to work. "I hope my vote today is a strong step toward restoring bipartisanship in Washington." Brown's first vote shows many that there is no way to predict how the Senate is going to vote now. The apocalypse that the Democrats saw with his election may, in fact, not be coming at all. We will all just have to wait and see.