By a 14-9 vote, with the support of just one Republican (Olympia Snowe of Maine), the Senate Finance Committee voted Tuesday to pass the Baucus health care reform almost-bill. The measure, which doesn’t really exist anyway, will now be officially tossed aside so that the staffs of the Democrat leaders in the Senate will write the bill, taking their marching orders from the White House.

Snowe said that her committee vote doesn’t mean she’ll necessarily support the final bill, and other Senators worry that what gets written now will be even more leftist and even more expensive than the Baucus outline. And they’re right to worry, because that’s what will happen.

As for Snowe’s next vote, she has a hard political calculation to make. When Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson leaves the Senate to run for the governorship of Texas, Snowe will be in line to become the ranking GOP member on the Commerce Committee. However, there are looming threats from other Republican senators to vote against her taking that position if she supports Obamacare in any form. Snowe’s next election comes in the next presidential election cycle, 2012. It will be a time of high emotion and a time where, even in New England, you’re likely to see primary challenges to Republican-In-Name-Only (RINO) politicians. And, unlike 2006 and 2008, there will be a highly motivated conservative and libertarian part of the electorate who are absolutely fed up with incumbents.

Snowe can possibly thread the political needle, satisfying the many liberal Republicans in Maine as well as her more economically rational colleagues in the Senate by voting against the final bill.

Even with Snowe, there is a strong chance that a few Democrats will abandon Obamacare and that the Democrats will not be able to muster a 60-vote filibuster-defeating majority. In that case, they will either have to start over, as most of the public wants them to do, or risk running part of their plan through the budget reconciliation process, requiring 51 votes but not subject to filibuster. That route poses huge political risks, not least to Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid who already trails in polls in Nevada. In fact, it’s such a repugnant tactic and so politically aggressive, that there’s even a small chance they could lose enough Democrats not to be able to get 51 votes for such a “budget” measure.

In one sense, today is a dark day for America. In another sense, it is just the latest wake-up call for Americans that government is about to do something terrible to them regardless of what the citizens want. It is a reminder that elections have consequences. And it is a reminder to Republicans that they’d better start standing for something and giving voters a real reason to vote for them. Even with Democratic policies this bad, the GOP can’t be assured that just “not being a Democrat” will be a winning strategy in 2010 (although it worked for the Democrats in 2006 and 2008.) And there’s no reason Americans should tolerate a GOP who thinks that will be enough. If we’re going to get a choice between big spenders who are honest about it (Democrats) and big spenders who aren’t honest about it (Republicans through most of this decade), voters will just go with the real deal. For the clarity it should bring to the thinking of many Americans, the vote on the Baucus almost-bill isn’t all bad.