After 10 months of Nancy Pelosi at the helm of the House, Americans could be forgiven for unfurling their umbrellas should the speaker announce the sun was shining. A "historic" vote for "health care," huh? The lady says so.

Let her have her day. She worked hard enough for it -- and in the end, notwithstanding a Democratic margin of 81 votes, prevailed by only five. Thirty-nine Democrats saw through her, as well as President Obama's verbal promiscuity concerning the wonderfulness of a House bill structured so as to remove from Americans the oversight of their own health care.

The Democrats don't want plain, ordinary people -- you and me, say -- making vital decisions. They want the federal government in charge.

It won't happen this year or the next. The Senate -- the saucer that cools overheated legislation from the House -- will drastically alter the shape of the legislation or else make it go away. So, the speaker of the House won't get her way: Washington won't take over -- yet -- as physician to a nation.

The sad part is the sheer, debilitating waste of time and energies that the health care debate -- to give this mess a genteel name -- has inflicted on a nation with extraordinary economic and foreign policy challenges.

We all know the federal government, meaning the American people, can't afford another $1.3 trillion in government spending over the next decade; nor has the speaker, or anyone else, ever established how you can increase demand for health care -- an extra 30 million or so customers -- without increasing the supply needed to meet the demand. Or what might be the value of higher taxes to underwrite such a scheme. The Democrats' arrogance left them lecturing the voters, including the majority who polls show reject Pelosi-ism, on little more than the urgent need to let the government do something. Continued...