WHAT A DIFFERENCE THREE MONTHS MAKES…. In October, about a month before Election Day, House Democrats scheduled a vote on S-CHIP, extending healthcare to low-income children. The point, obviously, was to pressure Republicans on a key issue at a key time. Who wants to take a stand against helping poor kids in the heat of an election season?
At the time, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-Mich.), the chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee, wasn’t swayed.
If our Republican Party is daunted by the politics of S-CHIP and shrinks from reaffirming its defining principles, social welfare programs will never help poor Americans escape governmental dependence. Instead, the Democrats will continue their push to shackle Americans with a bureaucrat-centered health care system and other insidious forms of governmental dependence; and our Republican Party — the party of the Great Emancipator — will not only lose the next election.
It will lose its soul.
That was in October. Yesterday, McCotter voted for the exact same S-CHIP bill.
So, what happened? A month after writing that the Republican Party’s soul was on the line over S-CHIP, McCotter won a mere 51% of the vote against a Democrat that barely raised any money and who few had ever heard of.
I guess it’s the kind of thing that leads one to reevaluate insidious forms of governmental dependence.
Update: It’s been brought to my attention that McCotter’s blog post was written in October 2007, not October 2008. Oops. So, let’s make that, “What a difference 15 months makes….”
