Democrats Would Have Supported War Funding If Bush Had Supported SCHIP
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) derided the war funding bill as an example of “misplaced priorities,” pointing to Bush’s veto of a five-year, $35 billion expansion of a children’s health program. “For the cost of less than 40 days in Iraq, we could provide health-care coverage to 10 million children for an entire year,” she said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) echoed that line of attack on Bush. “He repeatedly says no to health care, no to law enforcement, no to homeland security, no to stronger infrastructure,” Reid said at a news conference. “But he says yes to this intractable civil war in Iraq, which is being paid for by borrowed money.”White House spokesman Tony Fratto rejected the comparison with the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, saying Bush wants only to make sure it focuses on poorer children and the vetoed bill would have covered families with too much income. “The president has said that the policy is wrong,” Fratto said. “He didn’t say that it’s too expensive.”
I refuse to ignore the fact that the Democrats are arguing on much worse ground than in the spring, before Iraq showed significant signs of stabilization. Small wonder they want to focus on S-CHIP, even though it is essentially a non-sequitur in this debate, as the expansion of a moderate program to cover poor children into a middle-class entitlement would not have been mutually exclusive to Iraq war funding anyway.
The Democrats may find themselves in a vice if they wait too long. In April and May, they had momentum on their side in their attempt to force a commitment to withdrawal ” and they still lost. The President played hardball against Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, refusing to swerve in their game of chicken and forcing them to act before the money ran out. The end result was a complete capitulation, and Bush got the full funding request, even with casualty rates rising.
The situation has changed since then, and not in favor of Reid and Pelosi. Casualty rates have dropped dramatically in Iraq, across the board. US and Iraqi military combat deaths have declined sharply, and civilian death rates have plummeted. Anbar has seen an 82% drop in violence since June, even though many had given up on the region as irretrievably lost. Where the Democrats may have had an argument in the spring about throwing money away on a failure, the success has become so evident that even Democrats have stopped talking about casualty rates.
The Hill reminds us that Pelosi to launch PR blitz to beat ‘08 media frenzy, which I talked about yesterday. Memeorandum has more coverage.
October 24, 2007 - 05:49 AM on October 24th, 2007
The Democrats just want to defund DOD, leave the troops out of ammo in Iraq and Afghanistan, and force the taxpayers to support Donkey lazy leaches.