Back in 2000, George Bush ran on a platform dubbed “compassionate conservatism”. There were certainly overlaps with Catholic social teaching, so much so that many Catholics were seduced by this smooth Texas melody. After the election, John DiIulio served as the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Initially enthusiastic, DiIulio soon became disenchanted. He noticed that everything was about partisan politics, and that the administration had not the slightest interest in implementing the kinds of policies it had championed during the campaign. DiIulio resigned, the first casualty of the Bush administration.
And now DiIulio is back, with a stinging rebuke of Bush administration policies. He starts by recalling Bush’s early emphasis on the common good, such as when he argued that the government’s role was to pursue the common good, and that “good is not common until it is shared by those in need.” As an example, there are some things the government should be doing, like Medicaid for poor children.” But reality differs slightly from rhetoric:
“Poverty rates have risen in many cities. In 2005, Washington fiddled while New Orleans flooded, and the White House has vacillated in its support for the region’s recovery and rebuilding process. Most urban religious nonprofit organizations that provide social services in low-income communities still get no public support whatsoever. Several recent administration positions on social policy contradict the compassion vision Bush articulated in 1999.
In May, Bush rejected a bipartisan House bill that increased funding for Head Start, a program that benefits millions of low-income preschoolers. His spokesmen claimed the bill was bad because it did not include a provision giving faith-based preschool programs an absolute right to discriminate on religious grounds in hiring.
Last week, Bush threatened to veto a bipartisan Senate plan that would add $35 billion over five years to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The decade-old program insures children in families that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but are too poor to afford private insurance. The extra $7 billion a year offered by the Senate would cover a few million more children. New money for the purpose would come from raising the federal excise tax on cigarettes.
Several former Bush advisers have urged the White House to accept some such SCHIP plan. So have many governors in both parties and Republican leaders in the Senate. In 2003, Bush supported a Medicare bill that increased government spending on prescription drugs for elderly middle-income citizens by hundreds of billions of dollars. But he has pledged only $1 billion a year more for low-income children’s health insurance. His spokesmen say doing any more for the “government-subsidized program” would encourage families to drop private insurance.
But the health-insurance market has already priced out working-poor families by the millions. With a growing population of low-income children, $1 billion a year more would be insufficient even to maintain current per-capita child coverage levels. Some speculate that SCHIP is now hostage to negotiations over the president’s broader plan to expand health coverage via tax cuts and credits. But his plan has no chance in this Congress; besides, treating health insurance for needy children as a political bargaining chip would be wrong.”
Bear this in mind as more and more prominent Republicans fall over themselves to don the pro-life mantle, given a less-than-perfect history in this area. But we should take comfort in the fact that they will never back-pedal on their commitments to big business!
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