After winning the Democratic primary to fill the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is poised to become the Bay State’s first female senator. It's a bit late. Indeed, many Northeastern states only recently entered the female-senate-representation club, while the first women senators were from the South and Midwest. Click through this TNR slideshow for a look back at the first ten women who made their way into the ultimate boys’ society.

The fate of Obamacare now rests with the Senate, and it will pivot on Harry Reid's ability to overcome one measure in particular: the filibuster. It wasn't always so easy to block legislation using this tactic, since senators no longer have to remain on the floor and read out loud until their wills--or their bladders--give out.

WASHINGTON -- One of the tragedies of the viciously politicized battle over health care reform is the defection of the nation's Roman Catholic bishops from a cause they have championed for decades.

Indifferent to political fashions, the bishops were the strongest voices in support of universal health coverage, a position rooted in Catholic social thought that calls for a special solicitude toward the poor.

It's Wednesday morning. House leaders have indicated they want to vote on both the Senate health care bill and amendments to it by Saturday night. But, as you may have noticed, they still haven't said precisely what the wording of those amendments will be. And that's because they still haven't finalized them.

Today's New York Times lays out Mitch McConnell's overarching strategy:

The controversy over the "deem-and-pass" strategy will probably end very quickly. (I expect Democrats to conclude it's not worth the hassle.) But it's another telling episode in the health care saga. Conservatives have spent the last day in a fit of outrage at the prospect that House Democrats might enact the Senate health care bill and changes to it in one vote rather than two.

For the better part of an hour, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been kicked back in the front cabin of Coast Guard One, the small but handsomely appointed plane on which she travels, chatting easily about the challenges of running the third-largest Cabinet department.

One thing I've been wondering about the last few months is what exactly happened behind the scenes with Olympia Snowe and the health care negotiations. Today, her former health care adviser, William F. Pewen, has a New York Times op-ed. After reading it, I'm still wondering.

Pewen blames Republicans for cynically opposing any reform for partisan reasons:

Today David Brooks has written the platonic ideal of a David Brooks column. It is in some sense the template for nearly every David Brooks column, but it captured the major elements so perfectly that it almost feels as if every previous David Brooks column has been an homage to this one.

It begins with an interesting little sociological ditty:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a longtime advocate for universal health care. She’s also demonstrated that she has a good feel for the politics of her chamber and her party, simply by passing so many major pieces of legislation this year. So when Pelosi says that the votes to pass a public option in health care reform just aren’t there, I assume she’s right—or, at the very least, that she’s more likely to be right about it than, say, I am.

Democrats appear likely, though they haven't fully decided, to pass health care reform via something called a "self-executing rule." Instead of passing the senate health care bill and then passing the changes to it in a separate reconciliation bill, they'd pass a reconciliation bill with a "rule" that deemed the Senate bill to have been passed. So, one vote instead of two. The tactic is called "deem-and-pass."

If the Republicans are going to continue spreading the fiction that Congressional Democrats are playing fast and loose with procedural rules, then D.C. journalists at least have the obligation to fully explain those procedures to their readers and put them in the proper context.

There has been a lot of argument over whether passing health care reform or letting it die would offer the most attractive strategy for Democrats. Norman Ornstein and Tom Mann really move the ball down the field by looking more closely at what happened in 1994:

I have argued that rising unemployment inevitably imperils the political prospects of a president and his party. So I’m not surprised that President Barack Obama’s approval ratings have steadily fallen over the last year, or that Democrats have fared poorly in recent elections. And it’s fair to say that if unemployment continues to rise, or stays at the same elevated level, the Democrats will have trouble in the midterm elections this November.

It looks like the coming House vote on health care reform will be the decisive one after all.

Although the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate bill in the Senate still hasn't been finalized, let alone unveiled, the rumors that have crept out so far (namely, that the bill's going to abandon cap-and-trade and go for a multi-sector approach, where different of polluters—refiners, utilities, manufacturers—are each regulated differently) have already sparked a fair bit of discussion.

Disgruntled (if not former) Democrats Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen are the latest to join in offering advice to President Obama and Congressional Democrats to abandon their health reform quest before it causes catastrophic damage to the party.

From Politico's Pulse:

If all goes as planned, next weekend the House of Representatives will vote on health care reform. That much we know.

But on what actual bill or bills will the House vote? And what's likely to happen next? Those are critical questions and, on Saturday, several sources said that no final decision had been made.

The roll call was less than twenty-four hours away. And the votes still weren’t there. It was more than eight months ago--June 25, 2009--and the White House was hosting a luau on the South Lawn for members of Congress and their families. But with the House set to vote on cap-and-trade the next day, key members of the president’s staff and House leaders were huddling about how to proceed. There was even some talk of postponing the vote, according to two sources with knowledge of the conversation.

Harold Pollack is the Helen Ross Professor of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago and a Special Correspondent for The Treatment.

More in sorrow than in anger, Washington Times editorialists are concerned that President Obama doesn't do enough to control costs. The Times particularly chides the President for delaying the proposed "Cadillac tax" on costly insurance plans.

Somewhere in the White House or Capitol Hill, I imagine, is a whiteboard that looks like this:

The debate over the use of budget reconciliation to pass relatively small changes to a health care reform is an unusual one. Republicans keep charging that it's unprecedented. Experts on Congressional procedure keep debunking them. Here's an NPR story quoting Georgetown's Sara Rosenbaum explaining that reconciliation has been used repeatedly for health care changes.

A while ago Ezra Klein said he wasn't obsessively following the declarations of every member, in part because everybody would be posturing and he couldn't take their statements at face value. He's got the right idea. It's hard to ignore what members say and, surely, often those statements have actual news value.

This is the kind of thing the Democrats need more of right now: