Still No On SCHIP

Thursday, October 25th 2007
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Even trying to schedule the vote with some key anti-SCHIP Republicans out in California, the retooled SCHIP bill failed to get the 2/3rd majority needed to get passed the President.

The final vote was 265-142, with 43 Republicans joining 220 Democrats to support the measure. Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.), one of the most endangered incumbents in the House who hails from a conservative district, was the lone Democrat to join Republicans in opposing the measure.

Those 43 Republicans are almost identical to the 45 who supported the original bill in late September, with one Republican who previously supported the SCHIP bill - Rep. Don Young of Alaska - absent today. Another early supporter, Rep. Vern Ehlers (R-Mich.), switched to a ‘nay’ vote today.

If all their supporters were on hand for another veto override, Democrats would still be almost 15 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to defeat Bush. (Last week’s override vote fell 13 short of the two-thirds majority of the 429 members who voted.)

Open Congress doesn’t have the vote up as of this post but here is the role from WaPo.

The expansion is truly dead. As Paul Kane points out, there are no more votes to garner,

Each of those lawmakers are on DCCC target lists, but none would ever make it onto The Fix’s Friday line as being in imminent danger of losing his or her seat. And, now that they’ve voted three separate times against an SCHIP expansion, it’s almost impossible to envision these lawmakers flip-flopping unless the bill is dramatically reshaped.

Texas is secure for a couple years in its SCHIP funding and gains very little from the Dems bill in Washington. For other states let’s just get a reauth of the program in place and not wait into November where they’ll have to get yet another emergency reauth in place.