Bush’s Poodle: Why Gallegly Won’t Fund Children’s Health Care

Apparently funding the health care of poor children is not as important to Congressman Elton Gallegly (R-Thousand Oaks) as funding the war.

After all, poor children are certainly not going to vote Republican when they grow up. If they survive without health care, that is.

There’s no doubt about it, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which would cost taxpayers $60 billion over 5 years, would be expensive. But isn’t it the legitimate business of government to protect those who are most vulnerable?

Only if it is not too expensive, apparently.

“I understand where the president is, and I agree with him on this issue,” Gallegly told the Ventura County Star.

The president vetoed a bill to renew SCHIP on Wednesday, despite overwhelming support in the House and Senate.

The bill is popular with Republicans, Democrats, and most Americans. But not with Gallegly or Bush.

Both say the bill is too expensive. And, says the president, “government coverage would displace private health insurance for many children.”

This is certainly not true, but even if it were children with health insurance, even government-sponsored health insurance, are better off than children with none.

Senate Republicans have bent over backwards to meet the president’s demands.

“Frankly, I think the president has had pretty poor advice on this,” said Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah).

“I can answer every objection that they’ve made, and I’m very favorable to the president. I know he’s compassionate. I know he’s concerned about these kids, but he’s been sold a bill of goods.”

Gallegly told the Star that “this is a classic case of the ugliest part of our government process, which is taking something as critical as the healthcare of children and turning it into political spin. Today is a day that I think is an embarrassment to this institution.”

Wednesday certainly was an embarrassment. It was embarrassing for Gallegly, for Bush, for the Republican Party, and for the nation. It shows the world that we value a wasteful war in Iraq—a war that has nothing to do with terrorism—more than we do the health of our own children.

The proposed $35 billion increase in funding for the SCHIP program, an increase that will cover a five-year period, mind you, is about as much as it costs to finance the war in Iraq for a mere three months.

The president just asked Congress for an additional $200 billion in war funding. The war in Iraq has cost about $457 billion to date, and increasing at a rate of about $300 million a day, according to economist Scott Wallsten.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the ineptly named war on terror will cost about $1.2 trillion between now and 2017.

Less than half of this amount, writes David Leonhardt in the New York Times, “would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.”

And yet the president and his obedient congressman can’t scrape up enough money, or moral courage, to help out 10 million poor kids.

Bush and his sycophants, like Gallegly, have been calling recently for more fiscal discipline. This is a laughable attempt to salvage some respectability at the last minute after six years of deficit spending.

The public debt is now up to more than $9 trillion, according to the Treasury Department. When Bill Clinton left office, there was a budget surplus of $127 billion.

And yet the president and his party continually tout themselves as being deficit hawks and Democrats as tax-and-spend liberals.

Nobody’s buying it, least of all now, and Republicans will pay a hefty fine at the ballot box in the 2008 elections.

The presidential veto is meant to be a check on congressional power. But in some cases, the president, be he (or soon, she) a Republican or Democrat, is just plain wrong.

This is one of those cases.

The Constitution provides Congress with the ability to override a presidential veto. The House needs 25 more votes to do this, and even Republicans are lining up to oppose the president.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are the last days of a failing presidency.

Will Gallegly go down with the ship?

That’s up to Ventura County voters. Let’s all turn out for the elections in November 2008 and show Gallegly the door.

Key Links:

Gallegly’s Voting Record, as reported by the Washington Post

“Bush Vetoes Child Healthcare Bill,” by Michael Collins, Ventura County Star, October 4, 2007

“Families Brace for SCHIP Demise,” by Carla Williams, ABC News, October 4, 2007

“Bush Vetoes Health Measure,” by Michael Abramowitz and Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post, October 4, 2007

 

“The Debt to the Penny and Who Holds It,” U.S. Department of the Treasury, Bureau of Public Debt, retrieved October 4, 2007

 

“Estimated Costs of U.S. Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and of Other Activities Related to the War on Terrorism,” Congressional Budget Office, testimony before the Committee on the Budget
U.S. House of Representatives, July 31, 2007.

 

“What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy,” by David Leonhardt, New York Times, January 17, 2007.

 

“President Clinton announces another record budget surplus,” by Kelly Wallace, CNN.com, September 27, 2000

 

“Snow, Praising Bush on Budget, Calls Clinton’s Surplus `Mirage,’” by Alison Fitzgerald, Bloomberg.com, December 21, 2005.

 

 

 

Simi Blinks First; Lessons from the Civil Rights Movement

It’s not quite over, least of all for Liliana, the immigrant sheltered in a Simi Valley church, but the Ventura County Star reported today that the city’s bill of $39, 307 to the United Church of Christ has been put “on hold.”

 

 

Make no mistake about it, the Simi Valley city council and the mayor blinked first.

 

 

Faced with the threat of legal action by the American Civil Liberties Union, the city made its first intelligent decision in this entire affair—it backed down. The church did not.

 

 

City Manager Mike Sedell is quoted in the Star’s report as saying, “The city’s biggest concern is public safety, cost comes later.”

 

 

Contrast this with what he told the Los Angeles Times last week: “We warned [church officials] that if they flaunted it in the public, then these [protests] will occur and there will be consequences.”

 

 

This lofty attitude came with a price: on shaky legal ground, the city is trying to repair its damaged reputation.

 

 

“The city will continue to pursue resolution of this issue, and the mayor will recommend to the City Council that further action against UCC to enforce the letter sent to UCC asking for reimbursement of costs be placed on hold pending further discussion,” read a joint statement issued by Mayor Paul Miller, the Rev. June Goudey, and others.

 

 

What will happen to Liliana remains to be seen, but odds are she’ll be deported.

 

 

It occurs to me that there are similarities between those who heckled the Little Rock Nine 50 years ago and those who picketed the churched harboring Liliana last week.

 

 

The protesters of both eras were intolerant, trying vainly to preserve a way of life that had already disappeared.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And now, 50 years after the forced integration of Little Rock Central High School, former president Bill Clinton held the doors open for those who bravely risked violence to claim the education that was justly theirs.

 

 

 

Politicians fall all over themselves to give lip service in commemoration of the event. In addition to Clinton, the governor of Arkansas and the mayor of Little Rock attended a ceremony honoring the Little Rock Nine. President Bush issued a statement: “We resolve to continue their work to make America a more perfect Union,” said the president.

 

 

The day will come, probably sooner than we think, when politicians will fall all over themselves to praise the contributions of Latinos to American culture. They will say that they always supported a humane immigration policy.

 

 

When that day comes, we will remember those like Mayor Miller and Congressman Elton Gallegly barred the gates.

 

 

The United States should adopt more humanitarian immigration legislation, that which allows economic migrants, like Liliana, to stay in the country as guest workers. Groups like Save Our State would deride this as amnesty, but they forget our long tradition of offering shelter to those like Liliana who come here seeking a better life.

 

 

I’ll take Rev. Goudy’s version of America over Mayor Miller’s any day.

 

 

A Better Way to Win the War

While we debate, with the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, what to do about the Iraq war, we may be tempted to forget that Iraq had nothing to do with the events of six years ago today.

 

 

The timing of the testimony of the general and the ambassador is no coincidence, as Barack Obama pointed out today on Capitol Hill. “I think we should not have had this discussion on 9/11 or 9/10 or 9/12,” said Obama. “It perpetuates this notion that the original attacks had something to do with going into Iraq.” The timing of these hearings is cynical, but not a surprise when dealing with the Bush administration, for which no blow is too low.

 

 

The president was mistaken to go to war against Iraq and worse yet, bungled our nation’s response to the atrocities of September 11. But we can make things right again. We should follow the advice of Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz in his essay, “After September 11: Thoughts on What Can Be Done,” posted one week after the attacks. Ferencz advocated bringing Osama Bin Laden and his co-conspirators to trial in an ad hoc international criminal tribunal like those used for the ex-Yugoslavia and for Rwanda.

 

 

Following this course of action, if we can catch Bin Laden or convince him to hand himself over – he might fancy himself a martyr and relish the stage – would be to redeem September 11 in our memories. Instead of being a day solely of sadness, a sadness we will always have, we will remember it as an event finally brought some closure by the conviction of at least a few of the perpetrators in a fair court of law on charges of crimes against humanity. The entire world will at that point have to recognize that the events of September 11 were a crime, not a political statement, and that Americans sought justice and were vindicated.

 

 

I iterate this argument more completely, I hope, in my recent post to The Gage Page.

 

 

I hope there are others out there who are tired of these wars and want to return, or perhaps finally work our way to, a rule of law, to a dignified position as an enlightened, responsible member of the family of nations. Doing so will prove to be a better way to win the war.