Black Box Report

He said he would, and he did.

His other three vetoes were given the full photo-op ceremony treatment. He even gave a nationally televised address for one of them. But this time? Eh, not so much. And you can understand why. Vetoing a bill for children's health care 2 days after declaring October 1 to be Child Health Day is not exactly good PR. After all, what would he say to all the "snowflake babies?"

"Glad you're here, every life is precious, but if your family falls on hard times, you're not my problem. Now shove off?"

Veto accomplished, Bush told a Pennsylvania crowd that he's now ready to "compromise" with Congress. There's just one problem with that:

The White House is signaling its willingness to compromise, but the bill Congress sent him was already a compromise. The original House measure was a lot more generous. Bush, meanwhile, continues to tout his own proposal - which, because of its meager funding, would actually result in states forcing kids off the S-CHIP rolls.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) invited Democrats to beat his party over the head with this issue in the upcoming election, and Democrats will do just that. Republicans can argue all they like that this is an issue of fiscal prudence, but when anyone looks at the gobs of cash being spent on Iraq, this sudden attack of stinginess hits all the wrong notes. Opposition to S-CHIP is poison, and they know it. They will be attacked at the polls, and in the courts. Individual states can't get around Bush's restrictive new rules for covering their citizens as they see fit, so they're suing him. So says NY Gov. Eliot Spitzer in the Huffington Post:

The bureaucratic barriers to coverage the Bush administration has imposed are not only fundamentally misguided, but also illegal...

...They conflict with the statute authorizing SCHIP. Moreover, they were issued without the opportunity for public comment, as required by federal law. Accordingly, I have joined Democratic and Republican governors from states across the country to bring a lawsuit challenging these new rules in court.

It didn't have to come to this.

Yes it did. It's in his political DNA:

It's not so much his funding preferences that are at work. Rather, his ideology called for the government to pursue a hopeless war that's killed thousands...but is outraged by the idea of the government helping children attain health coverage. Ah, compassionate conservatism.

And now it's up to Democrats and Republicans of conscience to pressure holdouts in the House to override Bush's veto. One of those holdouts is Dennis Kucinich who, in classic purity troll fashion, voted against S-CHIP because in his view it didn't go as far as his own proposal.

Ahem...

While your insistence on a better bill is admirable, Dennis, your sense of political reality is not. When the alternative to your bill, which doesn't have a chance of passing, is millions of children losing their coverage, it's time to drop the grandstanding and get on board.