Is Our Republicans Learning?*

By Keith Boykin, in politics
Tuesday, October 16 2007, 1:11PM

George W. Bush once famously asked the question: "Is our children learning?" We all got a laugh out of it, and everyone joked about what an inarticulate president we have. But purposeful ignorance is not necessarily funny, and outright indifference isn't funny at all.

You would think that President Bush would have learned a lesson about indifference to ordinary people's concerns after his Administration flubbed the response to Hurricane Katrina two years ago. And you would think that the President and his party -- still reeling from a failed war in Iraq, plummeting popularity, the collapse of the housing market and a series of embarrassing sex scandals -- would know better than to pick a fight over a popular government program that provides health insurance to millions of kids. But for some reason they want a fight. And a fight they will get.

A few weeks ago, President Bush vetoed legislation that would have expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (S-Chip), providing health insurance to an estimated 3.8 million children who would otherwise lack coverage. Bush said the proposal, which would cost $35 billion over five years, was too expensive.

That might have made sense if President Bush and the Republicans had shown the least bit of fiscal restraint in the past 6 years. But to suddenly get religion on fiscal discipline when it comes to kids makes no sense. Where was the fiscal discipline when they were running up hundreds of billions of dollars of new debt or handing out no-bid contracts to Halliburton and Blackwater and other Bush Administration friends to plunder Iraq? And where was the fiscal discipline when the Pentagon shipped $12 billion to Iraq on C-130 cargo planes and much of it simply vanished once it arrived?

The next day after the White House announced its intention to veto the bill, the Pentagon requested an additional $42 billion for spending on the Iraq War for this year alone. That's $42 billion in one year for war and we can't afford $35 billion over 5 years for children. We have no money to continue a popular program to provide health care for poor kids at home but we can print up new money to fund an unpopular war halfway across the world.

President Bush says the program is the first step toward socialized medicine and warns that it would help wealthy families get government health care. That's just not true. Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post and Paul Krugman at the New York Times have already deconstructed the president's lies and misinformation on the S-Chip bill, and it's amazing that he thought he could get away with it.

But what's also amazing is that only 15 Republicans in the the U.S. Congress stand in the way of overriding Bush's veto, even though the majority of the public and the overwhelming majority of the Congress support the program. It's time for the Republican leadership to tell those members to stand down. And it's time for the constituents in those districts to tell their members of Congress to do the right thing and override Bush's veto.

This is unbelievably bad politics for Republicans and unbelievably bad policy for America. If the Republicans don't see that, then they still don't get it and they deserve to lose.

Although George Bush asked if our children are learning, it's also worth asking if our president is learning. And just as importantly, is our Republicans learning too?

(*Yes I know that's grammatically incorrect. That's the point of the headline.)

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