The fight in Congress over the State Children’s Health Insurance
Program (or “SCHIP”) continued last week, with Congressional
Democrats hastily forcing another vote on their once-vetoed
proposal to expand government-funded healthcare. Democrats have
been fighting for weeks to pass this SCHIP expansion. First, an
initial bill was passed, and was vetoed by President Bush for being
fiscally irresponsible. This was followed up by an unsuccessful
attempt to override that veto. Then, on Thursday, when several of
the bill’s opponents were at home in their scorched California
districts, looking after their constituents during a time of
emergency, Democrats tried a “power play” against their shorthanded
opponents by bringing a scarcely changed SCHIP-expansion bill
back to the House floor, after allowing Republicans barely
24 hours to read its contents and prepare for debate.
The timing of Thursday’s rushed vote was unconscionable, but it
was hardly the first case of political maneuvering by Democrats
during their extended quest to expand this government program. More
appalling has been Democrat rhetoric, which has gone far beyond any
reasonable bounds of political discourse.
Rather than deal with the substance of their proposed expansion
of government-funded healthcare, congressional Democrats used
language best left to extremists. They smeared Republicans, led by
President Bush, as callous, uncaring conservatives willing to let
children suffer to pay for their genocidal war in Iraq. “[H]ow many
children will be dead” if this measure doesn’t pass, asked Texas
Rep. Lloyd Doggett on the floor of the House. After the President’s
veto, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) claimed that “President
Bush used his cruel veto pen to say ‘I forbid 10 million children
from getting the health benefits they deserve.’” Majority Leader
Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said Republican votes against SCHIP expansion
and the President’s veto showed “a stunning lack of compassion for
some of the most vulnerable members of our society.”
The most reprehensible was Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA), who in
separate appearances on the House floor said that “the Axis of Evil
isn’t just in the Middle East, it’s just down here on Pennsylvania
Avenue” and that the President wanted to save the money being spent
on SCHIP in order “to spend it to blow up innocent people.” He also
added his opinion (which was immediately praised by bloggers at
DailyKos) that President Bush was sending American boys “to Iraq to
get their heads blown off for the President’s amusement.”
Earlier last week, much to the chagrin of the anti-war Democrat
base, Stark was made to apologize (though not before he Pelosi
singled him out and thanked him for his role in the SCHIP debate).
The pitched battle shows no signs of letting up, as Democrats in
Congress continue to proceed in the only way that they know how: by
ignoring facts and appealing to base emotions in their quest to
expand government. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has already told the
media that the way this debate has been handled would serve as a
model for future Democratic legislative pushes.
Nonetheless, despite their underhanded tactics, their attempts
to intimidate Republicans by painting them as being against
children, their refusal to compromise, and their shutting the
minority party out in writing the legislation, congressional
Democrats have seen support for their position decline, rather than
increase, over the course of the debate. The vote on the second-try
SCHIP bill saw only one representative , Vern Ehlers (R-MI), defect
from the position taken on the first SCHIP vote — and he crossed
over to the nays, rejoining his party on the side of
realism and fiscal restraint.
The fight will continue. Federal funding for SCHIP in its
current form ends on November 15, so some extension of the current
program will have to be agreed upon and passed. But Democrats have
made the massive expansion of government-controlled healthcare too
large a priority in their 2007 legislative agenda, and have spent
too much money and political capital on it, to let it go at that.
The issue will almost certainly come up again in the
not-too-distant future, though likely not as a stand-alone.
According to a source on Capitol Hill, the Democrats’ most likely
course of action will be to bury SCHIP in a bill that Republicans
would ordinarily overwhelmingly support, like a military
quality-of-life bill, thereby forcing Republicans to appear to be
voting against both the military and children, an apparent
lose-lose situation.
That, though, is a bridge that must be crossed when it is
reached. For now, the GOP has once again scored a legislative
victory, as Minority Whip Roy Blunt and Chief Deputy Whip Eric
Cantor again produced the necessary number of Republican voters to
limit this latest attempt at government healthcare expansion to a
total well short of a veto-proof majority. This gives the President
the flexibility to continue doing the right thing as well. The war
is far from over, but as long as each battle is won, the GOP
remains far closer to victory than to defeat.
