This morning, just after 7:00 AM EST, the United States Senate passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, marking a major step forward in the fight for health care reform. This comes after weeks of intense debate involving a million procedural motions that no one outside the beltway understands. Comparatively speaking, the House passed its bill in a relatively normal fashion, believe it or not.

In a funny turn of events, when Senator Reid cast his vote, he accidentally voted no before throwing the Mason sign begging for forgiveness and changing his vote to yes.

Now the fun part begins. The House and Senate health care bills are radically different and have to be reconciled.  Of course, there are House members who are threatening not to support the provisions in the Senate bill and vice-versa.  This is your government hard at work, folks, hard at work.

It’s been a long and arduous process getting to this point. Efforts to achieve universal health care actually began with Theodore Roosevelt. You can check out our humorous history of health care reform here.

The Senate’s top Republican shows off his new moves.