President Bush’s veto of expanded child health insurance funding could deny medical coverage for about 18,000 Virginia children, Gov. Tim Kaine said last week.
Mr. Kaine and Democratic legislative leaders blasted Mr. Bush for his veto Wednesday of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and urged Congress to override it.
The governor said the $19 million Virginia would have received means 18,000 children of the working poor who are eligible for the medical coverage will have to be refused as early as next year.
Congress passed the Democratic bill to provide about $35 billion more for SCHIP over five years.
Mr. Bush and most congressional Republicans opposed the expansion because of its expense and size, arguing that it is a step toward socialized medicine. But many backed it, including Virginia Republicans Sen. John W. Warner and Reps. Frank R. Wolf and Thomas M. Davis III.
While the Senate can muster the votes needed to override the veto, Democrats in the House would need about two dozen more Republican votes to override the president.
Congressional Democrats called the veto “heartless” and set out to make Republicans pay at the polls. Mr. Kaine and Democratic House and Senate leaders took up the cause Thursday, about a month before an election for all 140 state legislative seats.
Mr. Kaine said the issue is important to state voters because Virginia receives about $94 million from the federal government that pays about two-thirds of the costs for enrolling low-income children in the program known as FAMIS, the Family Access to Medical Insurance Security program. It covers about 84,000 children and 850 pregnant women in Virginia households that earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but can’t afford increasingly expensive health insurance.
“I think it points out some things about priorities, and I think voters ought to take that into account,” Mr. Kaine said Thursday. “We feel like we’ve got a short amount of time to get this turned around so this project gets reauthorized and we don’t have to kick people off the [FAMIS] rolls.”
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Brian J. Moran of Alexandria said the leaders of the Republican-controlled General Assembly should join in urging Congress to override Mr. Bush’s veto, his fourth in his seven years in office.
“This should be a bipartisan effort to insure our poor children here in the commonwealth,” Mr. Moran said.
“It’s strange that the president and the Republican [congressional] leadership would have an attack of fiscal discipline when it comes to an investment in our children,” he said.
Republican leaders in the General Assembly dismissed it as a federal issue and called Mr. Moran’s comments election-year gamesmanship.
“This clearly is a federal issue, and once again the Democrats are trying to federalize or nationalize this election because they have no issues to talk about at the state level,” said House Speaker William J. Howell, Stafford Republican.
Scott Leake, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Walter A. Stosch, Glen Allen Republican, said state lawmakers had no business asking Congress to provide the additional money and called it “more of a political grandstand than a serious legislative problem.”
“Democrats, for as long as I’ve been working in this stuff, have chosen to mix and blend national and state politics to their perceived political advantage,” Mr. Leake said.
Virginia governors and legislators often call on Congress to support programs that benefit the state, particularly highway funding and support for protecting the state’s military installations from base-closing efforts.
Although Congress can extend the SCHIP program at its present level through continuing resolutions, states that operate the programs will have to reduce enrollments as costs increase or come up with the money on their own.
Last week, Mr. Kaine announced 74 state employee layoffs as part of state cost-cutting efforts to reconcile a projected $641 million revenue shortfall in this year’s budget.
• Still talking
Though William Donald Schaefer no longer holds an elected office, he is not invisible.
Last week, the former Maryland governor, state comptroller and Baltimore mayor was a guest speaker at the Pikesville Library in Baltimore County. He spoke to a packed room about politics and predicted that slot machines would be legalized in Maryland.
Asked whether he is a registered Republican or Democrat, Mr. Schaefer feigned a hearing problem. Though he is still a Democrat, his final years in office were marked by squabbles with prominent Democrats and a warm relationship with Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican.
Mr. Schaefer, who turns 86 next month, lost a bid for a third term as comptroller last year and now works at the offices of First Mariner Bank Chief Executive Officer Edward F. Hale Sr.
When asked how he would like to be remembered, Mr. Schaefer said he wants just two words on his tombstone: “He cared.”
• She’s the chief
A movie is in the works about the life story of D.C. police Chief Cathy L. Lanier.
The Hollywood Reporter said Tony Piccirillo (USA’s “Kojak”) is writing the untitled project for producer Bob Cooper’s Landscape Entertainment and Fox TV Studio.
“Here’s a white woman in a man’s world and an African-American world, working with agency after agency in a complicated jurisdiction like Washington, D.C., and she’s a single mom,” Mr. Cooper said. “This seemed like a rich area to look at.”
Chief Lanier, 39, is single mother who dropped out of high school after getting pregnant at 14. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty picked her from the ranks of the Metropolitan Police Department soon after he was elected in November. She now heads a 3,800-member department dominated by black male officers. In addition to dealing with the city’s high crime rate, Chief Lanier also has to deal with about 100 other law-enforcement agencies operating in the District — all of which seems to have struck a chord in Tinseltown.
• ’Heinous acts’
Whoever left nooses for a black Coast Guard Academy cadet and officer this summer committed an act of terrorism, U.S. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings said.
Mr. Cummings, Maryland Democrat, visited the academy in New London, Conn., last week with Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Thad Allen. He urged cadets to cooperate with a military investigation to find out who was responsible for the two incidents.
In July, a noose was left in the bag of a black cadet. A second noose was found in August on the floor of the office of a white female officer who had been conducting race relations training in response to the first incident.
Mr. Cummings, who is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee on coast guard and maritime transportation, said the “heinous acts” make it more difficult to serve in the Coast Guard.
The academy has pledged to hold additional racial sensitivity training, seminars and discussions in the coming months.
This column is based in part on wire service reports.
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