Son of SCHIP By Ruth Marcus / WaPo

[Demeter]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/16/AR2007101601540.html

Tomorrow, if all goes as expected, House Democrats will fail in their attempt to override President Bush's veto of the bill to expand the State Children's Health Insurance Program.

As a political matter, that's the good news for Democrats....

The calendar necessitates a two-front war: Fiscal 2008 started Oct. 1, with no spending bills completed. Meanwhile, the subtly titled Protect America Act expires in February, and Democrats want to get the surveillance bill done in time to avoid a replay of the law's steamroller passage this summer.

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In the short term, some Democratic leaders are using a "Son of SCHIP" strategy: leading with the spending measure most attractive to voters and daring Bush, once again, to veto. Their vehicle of choice is the $153 billion Labor- Health and Human Services bill, which includes all sorts of mom-and-apple-pie spending -- for disadvantaged public schools, special education, cancer research, Pell grants for college students -- and is lean on pork. Their message: It's not just poor kids' health care that Bush is gunning for.

One argument you can expect: The administration is balking at $22 billion for needs at home while it fritters away that much in little over two months in Iraq. This isn't especially persuasive -- like the war or not, the money it's consuming argues for tighter domestic budgets, not looser -- but it polls well.
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Meanwhile, the politics of the terrorism surveillance fight makes the spending battle look simple. The same "pass this bill or people will die" rhetoric that spooked lawmakers into acceding to administration demands shortly before the August recess will come into play again. The House has a liberal bloc demanding individual warrants for any eavesdropping that involves Americans but also a corps of skittish conservative Democrats and vulnerable freshmen. The Senate has, as always, the problem of needing to round up 60 votes.

In that difficult environment, the House has produced an impressively balanced measure that gives intelligence agencies the flexibility they say they need to monitor foreign communications without having to obtain a new warrant in each instance. At the same time, the measure would give the special court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act a stronger role in protecting Americans' privacy. The problem is that this measure constitutes the high-water mark for civil liberties in this debate; it could quickly become irrelevant -- overtaken by a Senate bill that is shaping up to be more permissive but still may not meet administration demands.

You can hear nervous Democrats asking: Haven't we seen this movie before? Can't we start talking about health care for children again?

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