Thread: Son of SCHIP

Son of SCHIP

By Ruth Marcus
Wednesday, October 17, 2007; Page A17

Tomorrow, if all goes as expected, House Democrats will fail in their attempt to override President Bush's veto of the bill to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

As a political matter, that's the good news for Democrats.

The next legislative battles, on spending measures and terrorism surveillance, find the Democrats in much more treacherous political territory -- at a time when Congress has its last clear chance to sell itself to voters before presidential politics entirely dominate the discussion.

"The first veto is the defining veto," House Democratic Caucus Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) told me, and Democrats were smart to play their strongest card first. Now, though, instead of arguments about health care for children that feed voters' preconceived notions of miserly Republicans, the fights are apt to feed voters' preconceived notions about spendthrift, terrorist-coddling Democrats.

The calendar necessitates a two-front war: Fiscal 2008 started Oct. 1, with no spending bills completed. Meanwhile, the subtly titled Protect America Act expires in February, and Democrats want to get the surveillance bill done in time to avoid a replay of the law's steamroller passage this summer.

In the spending fight, Democrats believe that the lesson of the 1995 government shutdown is that fallout from launching this nuclear weapon hurts the side (Congress) that deploys it. That conclusion is right, but it limits their maneuvering room in arguing for the $22 billion they want to spend over the president's announced $933 billion ceiling.

"You're fixing to see . . . a fiscal showdown in Washington," Bush said Monday, pistols twirling.

In the short term, some Democratic leaders are using a "Son of SCHIP" strategy: leading with the spending measure most attractive to voters and daring Bush, once again, to veto. Their vehicle of choice is the $153 billion Labor- Health and Human Services bill, which includes all sorts of mom-and-apple-pie spending -- for disadvantaged public schools, special education, cancer research, Pell grants for college students -- and is lean on pork. Their message: It's not just poor kids' health care that Bush is gunning for.

After that, the going gets tougher. Lawmakers feel pressure to finish the bills funding the Defense Department ($459 billion, up from $420 billion last year, not including war spending) and military construction ($65 billion, with a big boost for veterans' health care). Having obtained nearly all of the huge increase he sought for defense, Bush won't have much reason to negotiate on the remaining bills.

After he went years without vetoing a single spending bill, Bush's newfound commitment to fiscal discipline is suspect. Meanwhile, Democrats have reinstated pay-as-you-go budgeting rules requiring that increases in mandatory spending be offset by spending cuts or tax hikes. Of the disputed $22 billion in discretionary spending, just $5 billion reflects funding beyond what's needed to keep pace with inflation, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates.

Still, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) acknowledges, "The image clearly is the Democrats are the spenders. . . . It's a tough message" to sell to voters.

One argument you can expect: The administration is balking at $22 billion for needs at home while it fritters away that much in little over two months in Iraq. This isn't especially persuasive -- like the war or not, the money it's consuming argues for tighter domestic budgets, not looser -- but it polls well.

Meanwhile, the politics of the terrorism surveillance fight makes the spending battle look simple. The same "pass this bill or people will die" rhetoric that spooked lawmakers into acceding to administration demands shortly before the August recess will come into play again. The House has a liberal bloc demanding individual warrants for any eavesdropping that involves Americans but also a corps of skittish conservative Democrats and vulnerable freshmen. The Senate has, as always, the problem of needing to round up 60 votes.

In that difficult environment, the House has produced an impressively balanced measure that gives intelligence agencies the flexibility they say they need to monitor foreign communications without having to obtain a new warrant in each instance. At the same time, the measure would give the special court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act a stronger role in protecting Americans' privacy. The problem is that this measure constitutes the high-water mark for civil liberties in this debate; it could quickly become irrelevant -- overtaken by a Senate bill that is shaping up to be more permissive but still may not meet administration demands.

Republicans saw the power of the weak-on-security message in the 2002 campaign -- just ask Max Cleland. There's every political incentive for them to run the same play now.

You can hear nervous Democrats asking: Haven't we seen this movie before? Can't we start talking about health care for children again?

marcusr@washpost.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... newsletter

VA has an advertisement on tv with a crying woman and wounded vets -- they're running out of money while our Congress plays silly games.

All of these goofy a_s politicians need to be physically evicted from office, do not pass go, do not collect a pension....

I am sick of fiscally retarded people (Republicans/democrats) playing the gimme, gimme, mine, mine, mine card as our country sinks deeper in debt

I dont know about the rest of the country \ myself and my wife are tired of the games this current goverment is playing with health care

I almost sure they dont want to screw around with a bunch of angree mothers