If passage of this bill helps a single person anywhere, then it was worth passing in whatever form possible.
I’ve heard intelligent people I respect make arguments both for and against this bill, and while I don’t exactly find it encouraging that even many supporters are reduced to pinning their hopes on some future fixes that may never actually materialize while grumbling about how much the bill reeks at present, I’m at least willing to entertain the possibility that I might be missing some important perspective here.
For now, I’d just like to suggest that Tom may want to raise the bar a little higher than that, seeing as how almost any political action you could name, no matter how atrocious, has helped someone, somewhere, at some time. I think I can pretty well imagine what he would have made of some Bush administration flunky using this standard to justify the invasion of Iraq.