Friday, October 5th, 2007

Time	Event
5:54a	American Conservatism The Republican Collapse By DAVID BROOKS Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change. When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders. Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been abandoned. Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.” The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan. Over the past six years, the Bush administration has operated on the assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is an organism; that custom, tradition and habit are the prime movers of that organism; and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation’s unique network of moral and social restraints. Over the past few years, the vice president and the former attorney general have sought to expand executive power as much as possible in the name of protecting Americans from terror. But the temperamental conservative believes that power must always be clothed in constitutionalism. The dispositional conservative is often more interested in means than ends (the reverse of President Bush) and asks how power is divided before asking for what purpose it is used. Over the past decade, religious conservatives within the G.O.P. have argued that social policies should be guided by the eternal truths of natural law and that questions about stem cell research and euthanasia should reflect the immutable sacredness of human life. But temperamental conservatives are suspicious of the idea of settling issues on the basis of abstract truth. These kinds of conservatives hold that moral laws emerge through deliberation and practice and that if legislation is going to be passed that slows medical progress, it shouldn’t be on the basis of abstract theological orthodoxy. Over the past four decades, free market conservatives within the Republican Party have put freedom at the center of their political philosophy. But the dispositional conservative puts legitimate authority at the center. So while recent conservative ideology sees government as a threat to freedom, the temperamental conservative believes government is like fire — useful when used legitimately, but dangerous when not. Over the past few decades, the Republican Party has championed a series of reforms designed to devolve power to the individual, through tax cuts, private pensions and medical accounts. The temperamental conservative does not see a nation composed of individuals who should be given maximum liberty to make choices. Instead, the individual is a part of a social organism and thrives only within the attachments to family, community and nation that precede choice. Therefore, the temperamental conservative values social cohesion alongside individual freedom and worries that too much individualism, too much segmentation, too much tension between races and groups will tear the underlying unity on which all else depends. Without unity, the police are regarded as alien powers, the country will fracture under the strain of war and the economy will be undermined by lack of social trust. To put it bluntly, over the past several years, the G.O.P. has made ideological choices that offend conservatism’s Burkean roots. This may seem like an airy-fairy thing that does nothing more than provoke a few dissenting columns from William F. Buckley, George F. Will and Andrew Sullivan. But suburban, Midwestern and many business voters are dispositional conservatives more than creedal conservatives. They care about order, prudence and balanced budgets more than transformational leadership and perpetual tax cuts. It is among these groups that G.O.P. support is collapsing. American conservatism will never be just dispositional conservatism. America is a creedal nation. But American conservatism is only successful when it’s in tension — when the ambition of its creeds is retrained by the caution of its Burkean roots. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
6:01a	Limbaugh, Reagan, Kristol and Bush Conservatives Are Such Jokers By PAUL KRUGMAN In 1960, John F. Kennedy, who had been shocked by the hunger he saw in West Virginia, made the fight against hunger a theme of his presidential campaign. After his election he created the modern food stamp program, which today helps millions of Americans get enough to eat. But Ronald Reagan thought the issue of hunger in the world’s richest nation was nothing but a big joke. Here’s what Reagan said in his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” which made him a national political figure: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.” Today’s leading conservatives are Reagan’s heirs. If you’re poor, if you don’t have health insurance, if you’re sick — well, they don’t think it’s a serious issue. In fact, they think it’s funny. On Wednesday, President Bush vetoed legislation that would have expanded S-chip, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, providing health insurance to an estimated 3.8 million children who would otherwise lack coverage. In anticipation of the veto, William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, had this to say: “First of all, whenever I hear anything described as a heartless assault on our children, I tend to think it’s a good idea. I’m happy that the president’s willing to do something bad for the kids.” Heh-heh-heh. Most conservatives are more careful than Mr. Kristol. They try to preserve the appearance that they really do care about those less fortunate than themselves. But the truth is that they aren’t bothered by the fact that almost nine million children in America lack health insurance. They don’t think it’s a problem. “I mean, people have access to health care in America,” said Mr. Bush in July. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.” And on the day of the veto, Mr. Bush dismissed the whole issue of uninsured children as a media myth. Referring to Medicaid spending — which fails to reach many children — he declared that “when they say, well, poor children aren’t being covered in America, if that’s what you’re hearing on your TV screens, I’m telling you there’s $35.5 billion worth of reasons not to believe that.” It’s not just the poor who find their travails belittled and mocked. The sick receive the same treatment. Before the last election, the actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s and has become an advocate for stem cell research that might lead to a cure, made an ad in support of Claire McCaskill, the Democratic candidate for Senator in Missouri. It was an effective ad, in part because Mr. Fox’s affliction was obvious. And Rush Limbaugh — displaying the same style he exhibited in his recent claim that members of the military who oppose the Iraq war are “phony soldiers” and his later comparison of a wounded vet who criticized him for that remark to a suicide bomber — immediately accused Mr. Fox of faking it. “In this commercial, he is exaggerating the effects of the disease. He is moving all around and shaking. And it’s purely an act.” Heh-heh-heh. Of course, minimizing and mocking the suffering of others is a natural strategy for political figures who advocate lower taxes on the rich and less help for the poor and unlucky. But I believe that the lack of empathy shown by Mr. Limbaugh, Mr. Kristol, and, yes, Mr. Bush is genuine, not feigned. Mark Crispin Miller, the author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms — “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and so on — have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate. By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that’s when he’s speaking from the heart. The only animation Mr. Bush showed during the flooding of New Orleans was when he declared “zero tolerance of people breaking the law,” even those breaking into abandoned stores in search of the food and water they weren’t getting from his administration. What’s happening, presumably, is that modern movement conservatism attracts a certain personality type. If you identify with the downtrodden, even a little, you don’t belong. If you think ridicule is an appropriate response to other peoples’ woes, you fit right in. And Republican disillusionment with Mr. Bush does not appear to signal any change in that regard. On the contrary, the leading candidates for the Republican nomination have gone out of their way to condemn “socialism,” which is G.O.P.-speak for any attempt to help the less fortunate. So once again, if you’re poor or you’re sick or you don’t have health insurance, remember this: these people think your problems are funny. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
6:09a	Bush vs Child Health Insurance Misleading Spin on Children’s Health Trying to justify his ideologically driven veto of a bill to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, President Bush and his staff have fired a barrage of misinformation about this valuable program. Before the House votes on whether to override the veto, all members — especially those from Mr. Bush’s party who say they are concerned about millions of uninsured children — must look behind the rhetoric. Mr. Bush stretched the truth considerably when he told an audience in Lancaster, Pa., that he has long been a strong supporter of the S-chip program. “I supported it as governor, and I support it as president of the United States,” he said. As governor of Texas, Mr. Bush fought — unsuccessfully — to restrict the state’s program to children with family incomes up to 150 percent of the poverty level, well below the 200 percent allowed by federal law. As president, he is again trying to shrink the program for the entire country. His proposed five-year budget does not provide enough to continue enrollments at current levels, let alone cover millions of the uninsured. Mr. Bush’s primary rationales for his veto tend to disintegrate when examined closely. He contends that he wants to refocus the program on the poor — those who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford private insurance. Yet the compromise bill approved by both houses would primarily benefit poorer children. It includes various prods and incentives to get states to enroll many more children who are below 200 percent of the poverty level, and projections suggest that a huge majority of children who would be enrolled in the expansion would come from this low-income group. Perhaps the most eye-catching argument from the president is that the vetoed bill would have allowed S-chip to cover children in families earning $83,000 a year. That claim hangs on the extremely flimsy thread that New York — where insurance and living costs are higher than in many other parts of the country — has proposed extending the eligibility level to 400 percent of poverty, or $82,600 for a family of four. As far as most states are concerned, the bill would discourage covering such children, by allowing the enhanced S-chip match only up to 300 percent of the poverty level. What’s driving much of the Republican response to the bill is the White House’s contention that expanding S-chip is “an incremental step toward the Democrats’ goal of a government-run health system.” The only word that conforms to reality here is “incremental.” S-chip is a tiny blip in the federal budget compared with Medicare and Medicaid, the giant government-financed health systems. House members need to think hard whether it is worth denying coverage to millions of uninsured children just to keep the blip a little smaller. The bill primarily reflects a Senate version that was drafted with great care by key members of both parties. It embodies principles that would normally appeal to many conservatives. S-chip is not an entitlement program like Medicare or Medicaid. Instead, it provides block grants to the states, which can curtail enrollment if funds run out. Nor is S-chip permanent. It will need to be reauthorized again in five years, at which time some future Congress and president will be free to have another slugfest. The White House declined overtures to join in consultations while the bill was being framed, according to Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican sponsor. Like so many other things that Mr. Bush has gotten disastrously wrong, he’d already made up his mind and had no interest in listening to others’ arguments. Now it is up to Congress to show Mr. Bush that such blind partisanship will not be rewarded. For the sake of America’s children, lawmakers must override the veto. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
6:24a	Torture: End the Secret Bush Terror Weapon Debate Erupts on Techniques Used by C.I.A. By DAVID JOHNSTON and SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 — The disclosure of secret Justice Department legal opinions on interrogation on Thursday set off a bitter round of debate over the treatment of terrorism suspects in American custody and whether Congress has been adequately informed of legal policies. Democrats on Capitol Hill demanded to see the classified memorandums, disclosed Thursday by The New York Times, that gave the Central Intelligence Agency expansive approval in 2005 for harsh interrogation techniques. Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to the acting attorney general, Peter D. Keisler, asking for copies of all opinions on interrogation since 2004. “I find it unfathomable that the committee tasked with oversight of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program would be provided more information by The New York Times than by the Department of Justice,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote. The ranking Republican on the panel, Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, said Thursday night in a statement that the committee had been briefed on the administration’s “legal justifications” for interrogation. Mr. Bond said he understood that the administration did not want to turn over the opinions themselves because they had confidential legal advice. Administration officials confirmed the existence of the classified opinions but said they did not condone torture. The White House press secretary, Dana Perino, said she could not discuss C.I.A. methods but added, “What I can tell you is that any procedures that they use are tough, safe, necessary and lawful.” One 2005 opinion gave the Justice Department’s most authoritative legal approval to the harshest agency techniques, including head slapping, exposure to cold and simulated drowning, even when used in combination. The second opinion declared that under some circumstances, such techniques were not “cruel, inhuman or degrading,” a category of treatment that Congress banned in December 2005. Administration officials said Thursday that there was no contradiction between the still-secret rulings and an opinion made public by the Justice Department in December 2004 that declared torture “abhorrent” and appeared to retreat from the administration’s earlier assertion of broad presidential authority to conduct harsh interrogations. At a briefing, Ms. Perino said that it was “quite a testament to this country” that six years after the Sept. 11 attacks “we are still having a debate” about treating prisoners, but that “we don’t torture them.” President Bush, she added, “has done everything within the corners of the law to make sure that we prevent another attack on this country.” Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said the 2005 opinions had “reinstated a secret regime by, in essence, reinterpreting the law in secret.” Mr. Leahy said his panel had sought information on the opinions on interrogation for two years without success. Mr. Leahy also said his panel would hold confirmation hearings on Oct. 17 on Michael B. Mukasey’s nomination as attorney general. Several senators said they would closely question Mr. Mukasey, a retired federal judge, at the hearing about his views on interrogation. Mr. Leahy and Representative John Conyers Jr., a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, also demanded that the administration turn over the 2005 opinions. Mr. Conyers wrote a letter to Mr. Keisler saying, “The alleged content of the opinions and the fact that they have been kept secret from Congress are extremely troubling.” The letter, also signed by Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, asked the Justice Department to make available for a hearing Steven G. Bradbury, acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, who signed the opinions. In an interview, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said that in light of the administration’s apparent retreat from its legal embrace of the harshest tactics in 2004, the 2005 opinions “are more than surprising.” “I think they’re shocking,” Mr. Specter said. He added members of Congress voted to ban “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” in December 2005 without knowing that the Justice Department had already decided that the C.I.A.’s methods did not violate that standard. “I think the administration had a duty to inform Congress about these opinions,” Mr. Specter said. Intelligence officials have said the agency has dropped some of its harshest practices, including the simulated drowning called waterboarding. But the 2005 memorandums show that the administration has secretly continued to maintain that their use would be lawful. A senior administration official who insisted on anonymity said the opinion on the “combined effects” of different techniques was approved in May 2005. The opinion that the methods were not cruel or inhuman was approved later in 2005, the official said. Officials have said both opinions remain in effect. Both documents were written by the Office of Legal Counsel after Alberto R. Gonzales became attorney general. Mr. Gonzales’s arrival effectively ended a rebellion in the department in 2004 by lawyers who had found fault with the legal justifications for interrogation and surveillance. In a statement, a spokesman for the department, Brian Roehrkasse, said he could not comment on classified legal advice, but said any department opinions were consistent with the administration’s “strong opposition to torture.” Mr. Roehrkasse also expressed the department’s support for Mr. Bradbury, whose nomination to be permanent head of the Legal Counsel office has been blocked by Senate Democrats since June 2005. Mr. Roehrkasse said Mr. Bradbury had “worked diligently to ensure that the authority of the office is employed in a careful and prudent manner.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
9:35a	History: Missing Archived Email Like Missing Whitehouse Tapes? Did White House Lie About Loss of Five Million Emails? By Damon Poeter CMP Channel Wednesday 03 October 2007 When Congress asked about 5 million executive branch e-mails that went missing, a White House lawyer pointed the finger at an outside IT contractor. The only problem? No such IT contractor exists, according to sources close to the investigation of a possible violation of the Federal Records and Presidential Records acts. White House Office of Administration (OA) Deputy General Counsel Keith Roberts told the House Oversight Committee on May 29 that "an unidentified company working for the Information Assurance (IA) Directorate of the Office of the Chief Information Officer was responsible for daily audits of the e-mail system and the e-mail archiving process," according to committee chair Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. That briefing came about after it was confirmed by the White House in April that millions of e-mails had vanished from Executive Office of the President (EOP) archives from 2003-2005. "Mr. Roberts was not able to explain why the daily audits conducted by this contractor failed to detect the problems in the archive system when they first began," wrote Waxman in an Aug. 30 letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding. In that letter, Waxman requested that the White House provide the committee by Sept. 10 with an internal Executive Office of the President report on the e-mail system it said it prepared following the discovery of the missing e-mails, as well as the identity of the contractor responsible for daily audits and archiving. That deadline has come and gone with no response from the Bush administration on Waxman's request. The offices of the president and vice president are required to preserve all official communications, including e-mail, by the Presidential Records Act, a Watergate-era law which establishes that such communications are the property of the American people and cannot be destroyed. The Federal Records Act covers the archiving of communications by other parts of the executive branch. Contrary to Roberts' statement to the Oversight Committee, several sources, including an IT company currently doing contractual work for the Executive Office of the President, have told ChannelWeb that no outside company had a managed services contract to audit the Executive Office of the President's e-mail archiving system daily during the period when the e-mails went missing. "There are many contractors working for the [Information Assurance] Directorate and no single one provided audit and archive functions," said a spokesperson for Unisys, an IT security and hardware firm which has provided the Executive Office of the President "with a variety of IT services that support the Office of Administration." "We don't believe that Unisys is the Information Assurance Directorate contractor to which Deputy Attorney General Keith Roberts referred when he briefed Rep. Waxman's committee in May," said Lisa Meyer, director of public relations for the Blue Bell, Penn.-based company. Meyer said Unisys worked on a contractual basis for the Executive Office of the President on specific IT projects rather than conducting ongoing management of systems or infrastructure. "This is not a managed services contract. Rather, we operate at the direction of the government, performing tasks across the organization, not just for IA," she said. System Management Engineering, another Executive Office of the President contractor, does system design and consultancy work for the White House but has never had system management responsibilities, according to CEO Herbert Quinn. The Reston, Va.-based solution provider currently has a three-year IT services contract with the Executive Office of the President that will end in 2008, Quinn said. "We don't work at the micro level. Our assignment there is as an enterprise architect. We design systems, we don't manage systems," he said. Attorneys for two non-profit organizations that have filed lawsuits against the Executive Office of the President, the White House Office of Administration and other relevant agencies and officials over the alleged violations confirm the Unisys spokesperson's claim. "My understanding is that the audits started after this thing exploded," said Meredith Fuchs, an attorney for the National Security Archive, a non-profit public research institute and library based at George Washington University. The archive, which collects and publishes declassified and unclassified government documents for the public domain, filed suit Sept. 5 in Washington, D.C., against the Executive Office of the President, the White House Office of Administration, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the head of the Office of Adminstration, and the Archivist of the United States. Anne Weismann, chief counsel for private watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), said much the same. "On the contractor issue, my info is that through 2005, when they discovered the problem, there was no daily archiving or monitoring. It may be that once they discovered the problem, there may have been a contractor brought on," Weismann said. The National Security Archive and CREW lawsuits paint a picture of a White House that gave low priority to compliance with its archival duties under the law. The research institute alleges that the Executive Office of the President abandoned the automated record management system (ARMS) built by the previous administration to securely archive e-mails in 2002, never implementing another system for that purpose. The time period for the abandonment of the legacy archival system coincides with the Executive Office of the President's switch from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, referred to by White House Press Secretary Dana Perino in an April 13 press briefing. "In 2002, they abandoned Lotus Notes, went to Microsoft Outlook, abandoned ARMS, but never put in a new electronic records management system. So I'm told they just dumped e-mail on servers. This meant that anybody with access to the servers could potentially dump data and delete documents," said Weismann. "Each agency of the EOP's records are commingled. It's all just a dump. How much is missing? I think 5 million is the low end of what's missing." Interestingly, NARA's total agency IT investments went from $36 million in 2001 to $62 million in 2002, according to the Clinger Cohen Act Report on Federal Information Technology Investments. Drilling deeper, NARA's budget for IT development, enhancement and modernization (DME) shot up from $3 million to $17 million in that year-on-year period. Budget numbers for later years could not be confirmed. Yet in the year following the near-doubling of its IT budget, NARA suddenly seemed incapable of preventing massive data loss in the form of millions of e-mails. Meanwhile, the Oversight Committee is also investigating the use of Republican National Committee e-mail services by White House staff members, following allegations that RNC e-mail was used for official communications to avoid archiving under the Presidential Records and Federal Records acts. The Bush administration has countered that RNC e-mail was used to comply with the Hatch Act's provisions against campaigning with public resources by federal civil servants. "The truth is that every presidency that has had e-mail, has had problems with keeping e-mail records. But for this administration, it's particularly bad. Here we are, the most powerful nation in the world, and the idea that we wouldn't be preserving our history is just astounding," said Fuchs. Timeline of Events in White House E-mail Scandal 1994: Executive Office of the President (EOP) implements Automated Records Management System (ARMS) integration with e-mail clients for secure archiving of White House e-mails. ARMS automatically segregates, categorizes and archives e-mails according to whether they fall under Presidential Records Act or Federal Records Act. 1996-1998: White House IT staffer claims in U.S. District Court affidavits that e-mails coming into one White House server were not archived over a 27-month period. 1997: White House Staff manual establishes policy for staff to only use ARMS-supported e-mail clients (Lotus Notes and Oasis All-In-1) for all official communications. 2002-2003: Executive Office of the President switches from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook e-mail client. ARMS integration with Lotus Notes discontinued, not replaced with similar secure archival system for Microsoft Outlook. Presidential records and federal records no longer segregated and archived in separate storage servers. March 2003-October 2005: Some 5 million EOP e-mails deleted from servers, representing hundreds of days of missing created or received White House e-mails, according to Office of Administration. Oct. 2005: In response to government subpoenas, OA discovers missing e-mails, begins investigating how this happened. Feb. 2006: CIA leak case prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald writes that numerous White House emails from 2003 are missing from White House computer archives. April 2007: White House Press Secretary Dana Perino "wouldn't rule out" that 5 million e-mails lost in EOP system. Perino later says they "should be" on backup tapes. To date, White House has not shown evidence of the missing e-mails being restored via backup tapes. May 2007: OA counsel Keith Roberts tells House Oversight Committee an outside IT contractor was responsible for "daily audits" of e-mail archive system. Aug. 2007: Oversight Committee chair Henry Waxman asks White House to name unnamed IT contractor by Sept. 10. As of Oct. 3, committee has not received an answer. (Comment on this)
1:59p	Bush vs Child Health Insurance Reid: "No Compromise on Health Plan" By Charles Babington The Associated Press Thursday 04 October 2007 Washington - Calling President Bush insulting and detached from reality, top congressional Democrats said Thursday they will not compromise with him on a children's health program that Bush vetoed. The unusually harsh remarks underscored the tense relations between Bush and Congress's Democratic leaders, who are frustrated by their inability to change his Iraq policies, and by his intransigence on a popular state-federal health program for children. Democratic lawmakers say they hope the House will override the veto on Oct. 18, even though members of both parties privately call that a long shot. Regardless of the override outcome, top Democrats said Thursday, they are uninterested in further negotiations. "We're not going to compromise," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters in the Capitol. He called Bush's compromise overtures "an insult." "You cannot wring another ounce of compromise out of this," Reid said. "The president, what he has done with his macho pen, is really hurt children. He thinks he can waltz in here with his secretary of Health and Human Services, and sweet talk us - he can't. This is a man who is out of touch with reality." Other senior Democratic senators also dismissed Bush's overtures. In a separate event, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was somewhat less definitive. "We're saying to the president, 'We've compromised all we can compromise,'" she told reporters. She added, however, "we're always willing to talk. And I wish the president had made some of those overtures earlier on." Bush on Wednesday vetoed a bill that would have added $35 billion, over five years, to the State Children's Health Insurance Program. Bush has proposed a $5 billion increase in the program, which targets children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to buy health coverage. On Wednesday, Bush was he was willing to compromise with lawmakers "if they need a little more money in the bill to help us meet the objective of getting help for poor children." White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters Thursday that the president wants to "make sure that the children who are eligible for Medicaid and SCHIP who aren't currently enrolled are served first." "If people think that that $5 billion is not going to be able to serve that population, he's willing to talk about, well, then what number would be?" Perino said. But Reid and others rejected such talk. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., noted that the House had passed a significantly larger expansion of SCHIP, but senators would not accept it. An increase of only $5 billion would have trouble winning House acceptance, he said. It is unclear how the administration would pay for even a modest increase in the program, which covers about 6.6 million children. The vetoed bill would have raised the federal cigarette tax, now 39 cents a pack, to $1 a pack. The $35 billion expansion "is paid for" under the bill Bush vetoed, Reid said. Perino said Bush "doesn't need to raise taxes" in order to expand SCHIP by $5 billion over five years. House Republican leaders said a $5 billion increase could be financed through spending cuts elsewhere, which they did not specify. House GOP Leader John Boehner of Ohio criticized Democrats for scheduling the veto override vote for Oct. 18 rather than conducting it as soon as Bush returned the legislation. Democrats say they need time to urge about 15 Republicans to switch their stance and support the vetoed legislation. An override requires a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate. The Senate approved the $35 billion increase by a veto-proof margin, but the House fell about two dozen votes short of a two-thirds majority. Democrats' decision to postpone the override vote "is proof enough that they want to play politics with this issue," Boehner told reporters. Republicans want a more modest increase in SCHIP, he said. "We ought to sit down in a bipartisan way and get this resolved," Boehner said. SCHIP will continue operating at current levels under a temporary spending agreement approved by Congress. The White House had no immediate response to Reid's remarks Thursday. ------- (Comment on this)

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