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SCHIP still haunts the halls of Congress
By sage of monticello | October 31, 2007
The Senate will return to SCHIP today. This version of the bill was quickly pushed through the House, though it offers little improvement over the previous version of the bill.
The Democrats needed to swing 13 Republicans in the House to override the promised presidential veto, but only one Republican changed his vote. This is a result of the Democrats failure to include Republicans in any meaningful way in recrafting the bill. Instead of including Republicans, Democrats ran attack ads agasint Republicans in their districts. Its not hard to understand why Republicans, in addition to good policy reasons, had dug in on this issue.
The sequence of events encompassing SCHIP dmonstrates the Democrats’ mismanagement of Congress. They spent months crafting the first bill which they knew the president would veto.
Once that veto occurred, instead of trying to work out a compromise with the White House and Congressional Republicans, Democrats spent two weeks running ads against Republicans before even holding a vote to override the veto.
Democrats then put together a hasty revision and are now trying to move it through the Senate, even though President Bush has said he will veto it and the House doesn’t have the votes to override.
Topics: socialism, socialized health care, SCHIP |
