Veto this

No president since Millard Fillmore has vetoed as few bills as President Bush.

After more than six and a half years in office, he has struck down just three pieces of legislation. Among his recent predecessors, Bill Clinton vetoed 37 bills, George H. W. Bush vetoed 44, and Ronald Reagan vetoed 78.

Former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan is in the news this week for criticizing the president for failing to veto spending bills coming to his desk from Congress, which massively increased federal outlays and ballooned the deficit and national debt.

But now the president is threatening to use his veto to strike down a reauthorization of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). A compromise between the House and Senate bills would mean spending $60 billion on the program over the next five years, which is $35 billion more than would be the case at present spending levels and double what Bush requested. But it is also $15 billion less than the House approved. Congress would pay for this massive jump in spending by raising taxes on tobacco.

It’s quite possible that the White House is bluffing, for this is a very tough piece of legislation for Bush to veto.

You can see the campaign ads already. Certainly Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) can. The chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and former head of its campaign committee told The New York Times: “If the president signs the bill we present to him, it’s a major accomplishment. If he vetoes the bill, it’s a political victory for us. Public opinion polls show strong support for expanding kids’ health coverage.”

Succinctly put.

Fiscal conservatives and smokers would love it if Bush vetoed this bill, but the former are out of power and the latter are not a powerful constituency.

If Bush backs away from his veto threat — as he did on the student loan bill recently signed into law — he will attract criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill. House GOP lawmakers showed unity on this bill in early August, as five Republicans bucked their party while 10 Democrats voted with GOP leadership.

It is likely that there are enough Republican votes in the House to sustain a veto should Bush decide to issue one. But such a decision, which could be presented as hurting children to help smokers, doesn’t have a convincing ring of electoral success.

Vetoing the Iraq supplemental spending bill earlier this year was easy enough; it included a timetable for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and was easy enough for the administration to depict as the effort of a Democratic Congress improperly tying the hands of the commander in chief.

On SCHIP, the president is in a bind. A 100 percent increase in spending might be easy to oppose in most cases, but not in this one — not in this one.