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| Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are planning to complete a farm bill and an energy bill,
and renew an education funding bill. Susan Walsh/AP |
Democrats on Hill aim to aid middle class
Health insurance for children and college loan help are priorities in Congress this fall.
from the September 11, 2007 edition
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"You're giving them something that is worth a lot, but if you tell people you're going to do something that will leave them pretty much where they are today, it's not the same as helping somebody out of a hole," says Mr. Ornstein.
Another pending bill with a big payoff for middle class voters is an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The program was launched 10 years ago to benefit low-income working families who could not afford health coverage for children. But the bills that have cleared both the House and Senate would expand that coverage to 11 million children, up from about 6 million. President Bush has threatened to veto the bill.
A new census report on Aug. 28 shows that the number of uninsured children is rising and that 8.7 million children don't have health insurance.
With the program set to expire at the end of the month, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle say there's pressure to break the deadlock.
Republicans say that the original SCHIP program aimed to help families who made a little too much money to be on Medicaid, but were still below 200 percent of the poverty level. But some states expanded the program to families earning much more.
"Republicans want what we've always wanted – a sound program that covers needy kids first," said Rep. Joe Barton (R) of Texas, in a statement last week. Representative Barton held up a House vote on the SCHIP bill be demanding that it be read aloud.
"We know what constitutes a poor, sick child and we know what constitutes a voting-age adult with a $100,000 salary, and we know the difference.… We won't use welfare to buy votes," he said.
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) of New York, who directed the Democrats' 2006 campaign that put Democrats back in control of the Senate, defines the party's electoral strategy as winning a majority that can govern at 60 or 65 percent.
"Our most important task is to start with average people and figure out what they really need," he writes in "Positively American: Winning Back the Middle-Class Majority One Family at a Time." "Some may say that politics should not start with pleasing the average person. I strongly disagree. Pleasing regular people if it means making government work to improve their lives is what democracy and Democrats are all about."
With the war in Iraq and must-pass FY 2008 spending bills, Democrats will be hard-pressed to get much of this agenda to the president's desk. But campaign analysts say that the move to make small gains targeting the middle class is a shift for Democrats that could pay off next fall.
"The Republicans warned when the Democrats got in the first thing they would do is raise taxes, [legalize] gay marriage, and cut the military, and instead the Democratic agenda is more modest and more targeted to the middle class," says Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of the Rothenberg Political Report. "It's not the ambitious program to help the poor that the Democrats used to be known for. It's more modest which is a plus politically but a minus for some Democratic constituencies who wanted something more ambitious."
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