By Beauty Damned

Doin the Cretin Hop

There were two noteworthy opinions in the Washington Post today. The first pointing out one of the [seemingly unlimited] instances of the Bush administration saying they're going to do one thing and doing another altogether. Almost exclusively at the expense of the disadvantaged.

Children Left Behind

November 19, 2004

DEFICIT SPENDING didn't bother the Bush administration when the issue was tax cuts. Congress had no trouble finding "savings" to supposedly offset new costs when the costs were in a corporate tax bill stuffed with special-interest provisions. But when it comes to health care for poor children, different, stricter rules seem to apply. This week's lame-duck Congress is poised to leave town without taking any action to restore $1 billion in federal funding for children's health care that wasn't used before its Sept. 30 expiration and therefore reverted to the Treasury. Republican lawmakers say they don't oppose renewing the funding but insist that it has to be paid for with cuts elsewhere. The result is that some 200,000 low-income children will be at risk of losing health coverage in the next three years.

The issue involves the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which was launched in 1997 to help states provide coverage to low-income children whose families earn too much to be eligible for Medicaid. With $40 billion in federal matching funds over 10 years, this was the largest expansion of health coverage for children since the adoption of Medicaid in the 1960s; last year alone the program enrolled 5.8 million children. Even as the share of Americans without health insurance is growing, the percentage of children lacking coverage has stayed stable, in large part thanks to Medicaid and SCHIP.

But under SCHIP's complicated use-it-or-lose-it formula, unspent money is going back to the Treasury just as some states are starting to run out of money -- money they need not to expand coverage but to keep serving the children who already have it. Between now and 2007, 18 states (including Maryland) are projected to have insufficient federal funding, which would require them to drop some children or find money elsewhere.

"America's children must have a healthy start in life," President Bush declared in accepting the Republican nomination in September. "In a new term, we will lead an aggressive effort to enroll millions of poor children who are eligible but not signed up for the government's health insurance programs. We will not allow a lack of attention, or information, to stand between these children and the health care they need." Stirring rhetoric, but what's the point of providing information and then failing to provide money? It's a dubious sort of fiscal responsibility that only kicks in when poor children's health is at stake.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

The other article points out the inherent hypocrisy in the GOP's unmitigated maneuver to change the rules in order to protect DeLay and their majority in the House by exempting him from the rule that would require him to step down pending the outcome of an indictment. It is truly heartwarming to see how leniant and quick they are to unshackle their own republican cohorts from the restraints of that which was created for the sole purpose of ostracizing democrats past. So why would it surprise us, now that it's a republican and not a democrat whose ass is on fire, that the rule should be promptly suspended. These fuckers are doin' the cretin hop up in the House baby.

Revolution In Reverse

In solidifying its power, the GOP is loosening its ethics.

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

"And I want to say to you bluntly: You live today with the most corrupt congressional leadership we have seen in the United States in the 20th century. You have to go back to the Gilded Age of the 1870s and 1880s to have anything comparable that we've lived through."

Gosh, those Democrats must be really bitter about this year's elections to say stuff like that. Isn't it time to put aside partisan invective?

But however appropriate that ringing indictment may seem to the moment, it did not issue from any Democrat this week. The words were spoken in February 1992 by a House Republican named Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was then building the momentum that led to the historic Republican takeover of Congress two years later. The GOP modestly called what it was up to a "revolution."

As the old rock song taught us: Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

What's surprising is how shameless House Republicans were on Wednesday in casting aside their 11-year-old rule requiring a member of their leadership to step aside temporarily if he or she comes under indictment.

The repeal might be called the Tom DeLay Protection Act of 2004. DeLay, the House majority leader, is under investigation by Ronnie Earle, the district attorney in Texas's Travis County. Earle, who is a Democrat, is investigating charges that corporate money was used illegally to help Republicans win Texas legislative races in 2002. Republican victories that year paved the way for changes in the state's congressional district lines that helped Republicans win additional U.S. House seats in Texas this year, solidifying their hold on power.

Earle has already obtained indictments against three of DeLay's political associates. The Hammer, as DeLay is known, must be worried.

Recall how Republicans dismissed any and all who charged that the investigations of President Bill Clinton by special prosecutor Ken Starr were politically motivated. Ah, but those were investigations of a shady Democrat by a distinguished Republican. When a Democrat is investigating a Republican, it can only be about politics. Is that clear?

Rep. Henry Bonilla, the Texas Republican who sponsored the resolution to protect DeLay, said it was designed to protect against "crackpot" prosecutors whose indictments might get in the way of the ability of House Republicans to choose their own leaders. Can't let a little thing like an indictment get in the way of the sovereignty of House Republicans, can we?

"Attorneys tell me you can be indicted for just about anything in this country," said Bonilla. Remember the old days during the Clinton impeachment when Republicans went on and on about the importance of "the rule of law"? Oh well.

DeLay's response to the whole thing came, almost word for word, from Clinton's old talking points. "We must stop the politics of personal destruction," Clinton said in December 1998 after the House impeachment vote that DeLay had rammed through. On Wednesday, DeLay said that Democrats "announced years ago that they were going to engage in the politics of personal destruction, and had me as a target." Maybe it's time for Bill and Tom to sit down at that big new library in Little Rock for a friendly drink.

About the only defense Republicans can make for repealing their rule on indicted leaders is that the original motivation for passing it in 1993 was blatantly political. Republicans were trying to make hay over an investigation of Dan Rostenkowski, an Illinois Democrat who was then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. Rostenkowski was later convicted of mail fraud. If politics was behind the rule in the first place, why not be political now that the rule is inconvenient? Isn't this a case of admirable consistency?

Some Republicans, at least, remember what they stood for 10 years ago. "We took a strong stand in 1994 to make clear the Republican conference would live by a higher standard than our Democratic colleagues," Rep. Chris Shays, a Connecticut Republican, said in a statement. Shays also told reporters: "We won election in '94 because we were going to be different, and what I continue to see is a slow but very consistent erosion in what made us different."

Shays reminds us that when and he and Gingrich were in the opposition, they gave voice to many who worried about the dangers of an entrenched majority that came to assume it had a right to power and could do whatever was necessary to keep it. Gingrich's line about the Gilded Age just may have come 12 years too early. You don't have to be a crackpot to believe that the Gilded Age is now.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Posted by Maria at November 19, 2004 05:22 PM | TrackBack