President Bush has pledged to veto the renewal of SCHIP - the Children's Health Insurance Program. And while the bill passed the House of Representatives, Bush is emboldened because the House lacks a veto-proof majority by approximately 12 votes.
One of those votes belongs to Texas' Mike McCaul, who has rubberstamped Bush's every move, from denying children's health insurance to supporting, funding, and apologizing for this misguided war. So what's emboldening Mike McCaul? It's simple, a gerrymandered district drawn by the hands of Tom Delay.
I can tell you firsthand that taking on a well-funded Republican incumbent is no job for the weak-willed or easily intimidated, and that's why I'm proud to endorse Larry Joe Doherty - a Democrat who will unseat Mike McCaul and send a message of what real Texas values are.
I met Larry Joe Doherty, the Texas Justice guy, at the Washington County Labor Day Picnic. It's kind of cool to meet a celebrity especially one living here in Washington County. I always loved the Texas Justice Show. I thought it was great to see a judge who was approachable. He was like one of the people. He's the kind of guy that makes me proud to be living in Texas. Texans really are friendly down to earth approachable people who will give you the shirt off their back. Everything I've seen and heard about Larry Joe makes me believe he's the real deal. I see George Bush on TV with his scripted mispronunciations and I cringe. It's obvious the republicans are faking the good ole boy image to "lead" us. Anyway, back to TX-10. Here's what I know about Larry Joe, help me fill in the gaps.
He's an attorney who specialized in legal malpractice and is used to "taking on insurance companies". Wow, isn't that what we need to reform Health Care. I think the last figures I heard about health care was the country spent around $2.5 trillion a year. Insurance companies are the middle men in this industry, hiding the costs to the consumer. Since the insurance companies make money based on the percentage of money they handle, there is no incentive for insurance companies to lower that $2.5 trillion. Insurance companies have to love the talk of universal health care, that's just a higher percentage of the $2.5 trillion for them to handle. Health Care costs have grown at twice the rate of the US economy since 2000. Someone has to take on the insurance companies. Help us Larry Joe.
When Congress gets back to work after its August recess, the first thing lawmakers should do is unite behind a common sense initiative to support our National Guard troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 'Patriot Corporations of America Act' would require corporations to support U.S. troops by paying the difference between regular salary and military salary for all National Guard and Reserve employees who are called up to active duty, and by continuing health insurance coverage for the Guard member and his or her family.
The Children's Health Insurance Program is that rarest of government creations -- a joint federal-state effort that actually works to reduce the number of uninsured children in our country. No wonder Congressional leaders are trying to expand it -- and the White House is trying to dismantle it.
The question for us is this: will our Congressman join the bi-partisan effort to strengthen CHIP? Or will he stick with the short-sighted ideological opposition of the Bush Administration and leave millions of children without health insurance?
Just four Republican members of Congress had the courage late last week to vote for a bill requiring that U.S. troops stationed in Iraq be deployed by next April. Mike McCaul was not among those showing such courage. Instead, he voted to keep taxpayers' sons and daughters mired in the escalating violence while the Baghdad government continues to enjoy its summer-long vacation.
For Central Texans who have been watching Mr. McCaul put his rubber stamp on the White House's failed public policies for the past four years, his vote last week was no surprise.
When Tom DeLay engineered his redistricting scheme four years ago, he was riding high. In control of the White House and both houses of Congress, he and his partisan allies thought they could get away with anything, from a war of choice in Iraq to choosing a new representative to roam the halls of Congress for us.
Despite my previous assertions to the contrary, in this community and elsewhere, I can now report that Congressman McCaul's office will respond to a constituent's request.
They were kind enough to help me with an assignment for my "American National Government" course.
James L at the SwingStateProject has a good write up about TX CD 10 and how vulnerable McCaul is to being knocked off next year.
McCaul's 55% was easily the weakest performance from a Republican incumbent in Texas other than Henry Bonilla. On top of that, Michael Badnarik, the Libertarian Presidential candidate in 2004, outspent fightin' Democrat Ted Ankrum by a hefty $400k margin and only walked away with 4% of the vote to show for it. Numbers like that would indicate that the Democratic base is pretty solid in this district.
Now, what could be the source of McCaul's weakness? Is it possible that lingering resentment over the mid-decade redistricting carried over into 2006? Looking at a few of the other beneficiaries of the scheme who were freshmen during the 109th Congress, Representatives Poe, Gohmert, and Conaway all improved on their 2004 margins of victory, although Poe & Gohmert faced sitting incumbents in 2004 and Conaway was unopposed last year. Rep. Marchant (TX-24) did slip a little over the two years, but only by 4 points. No matter how you slice it, 55% is a terrible performance for an incumbent Republican in a district that delivered 62% of its vote to Bush in 2004, even in a rocky year like 2006. There is a weakness here, revealed by Ankrum's challenge, that perhaps an aggressive challenge can exploit.
One such challenger has already stepped up: Democrat Dan Grant, an international development worker who has worked on USAID projects in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. (He even posted a diary here last week.) I don't know enough about Grant and his organization to tell whether he'd be a serious nuisance to McCaul, but he has managed to raise nearly $25k on Actblue in just a week or two, a year and a half from election day--and that's more than one quarter of what Ankrum spent during his entire campaign. He could be a guy--and this could be a district--worth keeping an eye on.
