by John Atchison

Created on: March 03, 2010

When Scott Brown was elected the Senator from Massachusetts to replace the deceased Ted Kennedy, he was hailed as a great victory for the Republican Party. He was seen as a referendum of sorts by many who declared him to be a Republican savior against the tyrannical ways of the democrats in power. 

He was also seen as a sort of swipe at the agenda of President Barack Obama who would certainly be caused suffering by the new Senator who would instantly with his election put an end to automatic legislation passing that the Democrats would have had in place if he had lost the race to his rival.

In fact evidence of this very thought process was apparent from the get go when Brown voted against the Health Care Reform bill and caused it to not pass on the Senate floor. Boy how times have changed now though after only his third vote in Congress.

Brown's late February vote, in which he broke ranks with his Republican party constituents and instead decided to vote with the Democrats for the 2010 Senate Jobs Bill, helped save the bill from almost certain failure and quite possibly may have shown that calls for bipartisanship within Congress might not be dead after all. 

With the loss of Ted Kennedy and the illness being suffered by New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, the Democrats were in need of at least two Republicans to break ranks for passage of the bill and given the way voting had been going along party lines, this seemed nearly impossible.  That was until Senator Brown came along. 

Instead of voting the party line, he decided that he had to do what was best for the people of the state that elected him and thus voted for the bill. Senator Brown stated that even though the bill was certainly not perfect in any sense, it did have pieces to it that were very important to his state in particular.  

He correctly pointed out that the bill featured four provisions that included a measure exempting businesses hiring the unemployed from Social Security payroll taxes through December, providing them with a $1,000 credit if new workers managed to stay with a firm for a period of one full year, and also would renew highway programs through December and deposit $20 billion in the highway trust fund.  In the eyes of Brown, this was just too much to ask his voters to give up for the sake of partisan politics.

So how did his breaking ranks save the bill? Well the facts speak for themselves. Once

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