A Promise Kept And A Promise Broken
My colleague Kevin Friedl writes at NationalJournal.com's Under the Influence blog that President Barack Obama has not kept a pledge to post bills online before signing...
When President Obama signed into law an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program on Wednesday, he was keeping one promise while breaking another. The measure, designed to expand health insurance to some 4 million additional children, was a significant step towards his pledge to "require that all children have health care coverage. And in his remarks at the signing ceremony, the president called it a "down payment" on his broader pledge to bring universal coverage to the U.S.
But by signing the bill the same afternoon it was passed in the House, Obama fell to an 0-2 record on one of his most specific good-government promises, announced over a year and a half ago during a campaign speech in Manchester, N.H.: "When there is a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you will have five days to look online and find out what's in it before I sign it." The wording of that pledge has since been amended to refer only to "non-emergency legislation," but neither the SCHIP legislation nor the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act he signed into law last week meet that test.
Read the full post here.
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