Scott Brown will vote for the Democrats’ financial-regulation bill, thus ensuring its passage:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Scott (R-MA) today issued the following statement regarding the Wall Street reform bill:
“I’ve spent the past week reviewing the Wall Street reform bill. I appreciate the efforts to improve the bill, especially the removal of the $19 billion bank tax. As a result, it is a better bill than it was when this whole process started. While it isn’t perfect, I expect to support the bill when it comes up for a vote. It includes safeguards to help prevent another financial meltdown, ensures that consumers are protected, and it is paid for without new taxes. That doesn’t mean our work is done. Further reforms are still needed to address the government’s role in the financial crisis, including significant changes to the way Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac operate.”

What replaced the bank tax? Deficit spending, and another bank tax. It’s sad to see Brown cave on this. That said, it’s easy to understand why he’s doing it. Think of it this way: With or without this bill, we will inevitably experience another financial crisis. There doesn’t appear to be any appetite in Washington for the kind of reforms that would remove the distortions that led to the last one — this bill certainly wouldn’t remove them. And whether the crisis comes next year or a decade from now, people will take this vote into consideration when they start assigning blame.

If Scott Brown is the deciding vote against the bill, then it doesn’t matter whether he was right or wrong, because Democrats will make him into the next Phil Gramm: a conservative bogeyman who thwarted badly-needed liberal reform to please his friends in the banking sector. On the other hand, if he votes for the bill, then his share of the blame will be vanishingly small. It is the Dodd-Frank Act, after all, and the blame for whatever role it plays in causing the next crisis (and I believe it could play a large one) will likely and justly fall upon its namesakes. Still, I concur with the editors that Brown should have held out for further improvements. As long as the seat from West Virginia went unfilled, he held the upper hand. Now he’s needlessly thrown that advantage away.