As Congress prepares to send second S-CHIP bill to the president's desk, which provides $35 billion over 5 years to provide insurance to 10 million children, President Bush's and the Republican Party's spending on the Iraq war will likely exceed $611 billion for the past 4-plus years, according to data released by the National Priorities Project.
Without even taking into account additional requests for funds made by the White House in recent weeks, the total amount of funding for the Iraq war could have paid for the health care needs of 194,511,722 children, according to NPP.
Of course, there aren't that many children in the US, but the point is well made.
In a state like Georgia, where the Republican members of the House have imposed some of the staunchest opposition to the reauthorization bill, taxpayers have paid $13.2 billion for Bush's failed war policy, a sum that equates to health care for more than 6 million children or funding for more than 2,000 new elementary schools in Georgia.
Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price is one of those who opposes a modest amount of new funding for children's health care, which unlike the Iraq war is covered by an existing revenue stream. Price voted against childrne's health care – three times – apparently because the latest S-CHIP reauthorization bill doesn't exclude as many children as he would like, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
He and his fellow obstructionists are going to have make a decision about what their priorities are: using taxpayer funds to police a civil war in Iraq that is threatening to spill over into other countries or children's health care.
Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX), who voted to block the children's health bill and has plunked down his vote in the House unquestioningly each time for Bush's war in Iraq, is going to have to decide if he will cast a vote to help the more than 90 percent of those families covered by SCHIP who earn less than $41,000 a year and can’t afford the average $12,000 annual premiums to cover their children.
Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) will have to decide if he wants to exchange his seat in Congress for a vote to block children's health care in the name of the right-wing ideology of putting profit above people's health care. Voters in his district will become educated about how Walberg has consistently refused to vote to bring the troops home from Iraq, a decision that may end up costing taxpayers $2.4 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
None of that war spending has been "pay-as-you-go." This means that the very children who will suffer as a result of Walberg's vote will be paying for Bush's war for the rest of their lives.
Walberg's press secretary recently told a Michigan newspaper that Walberg opposed the children's health bill because, in addition to not excluding enough children for his tastes, the bill could have allowed the provision of funds to cover childless adults, illegal immigrants, and families earning up to $83,000 a year.
Of course, Walberg's complaints on this score are misleading, as funds are only allocated to those particular groups if a waiver is given by the Bush administration to a state to do so. What Walberg isn't talking much about is that the new bill carefully eliminates those provisions, capping income eligibility, establishing strict citizenship scrutiny, and eliminating adults. Nevertheless, Walberg proceeded to vote against children's health care a third time.
Walberg's vote against children's health care may play well in the Republican primaries where the Michigan GOP, which has taken an aggressively hard right turn in recent months, embracing hate groups and the anti-Semitic and white supremacist head of the fascist British National Party. But it won't win him a general election in November 2008.
In fact, State Sen. Mark Schauer (D-MI), Rep. Walberg's likely opponent in the 2008 elections, has already made Walberg's S-CHIP votes an election issue. Said Schauer, "I think what it really boils down to is, who is the member of Congress listening to? If they're listening to their constituents, they would support this legislation."
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During his various rants against children's health care, Florida Republican Rep. Tom Feeney declared S-CHIP, a program crafted 10 years ago by his Republican colleagues and signed into law by President Clinton and voted for by 44 House Republicans last week, "secret socialized medicine" and characterized it as "garbage."
"I did not support some of the changes that turned this into an international socialized medicine program," Feeney is reported to have said about the S-CHIP program. Feeney has voted for Bush's agenda about 96% of the time, including refusing to vote to bring the troops home from Iraq.
Feeney too will have decide on the future of his career. Recent polling shows that even when his ties to corrupt Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff aren't part of the question to voters, Feeney is in a virtual dead-heat with his likely opponent Suzanne Kosmas, who still has little name recognition in that heavily Republican district.
President Bush's policies have hurt the political careers of many Republicans who can't afford to stand for reelection in 2008. In the end though, this is a good thing. Congress can start fresh in 2008 with a Democratic president, a strong Democratic majority, and the extremist policies of the Republicans can become a distant memory.
