As we hurtle toward the 2008 election, Congress is proving this week that it cannot rein in runaway spending on entitlements. That is the meaning of what is happening in respect of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, a federal-state partnership originally designed to help provide health insurance to lower-income children in families that make too much money for Medicaid but could not afford private health coverage.

Many agree that SCHIP should be reauthorized, but a bipartisan swath of Congress has decided that simple reauthorization is not enough. It wants to expand it, with the House bill spending upwards of $50 billion and the Senate version tacking on an additional $35 billion. The budget office now estimates that the increased appropriations in the Senate bill would cover families earning as much as $83,000 a year.

That means that families with incomes as high as 400% above the federal poverty level would be eligible for government health insurance. It’s clear that these types of income requirements are hardly geared at “lower-income children.” Instead, this latest boondoggle represents another backdoor attempt to federalize our health insurance system. What’s more, Congress would supposedly fund this proposal by again raising the excise on cigarettes. Count us as skeptical that the noble smokers are the source of a long-term fiscal solution.

President Bush has indicated that he will veto the proposals, but mightn’t prevail in the Senate. It turns out that some Senate Republicans, supposedly the party opposed to this type of spending, are planning on voting in favor of the increases. They fear of being portrayed as voting against the expansion of a program ostensibly dedicated to health insurance for low-income children.

Senator Coleman is quoted by the Associated Press as saying there is a “legitimate concern” about the philosophical issues surrounding greater government health coverage. But he added that he would be supporting the bill anyway because, “I get past the philosophical” and the program was “an important issue to my state.” Closer to home, both of our own Senators voted against an amendment offered on Tuesday that would have limited SCHIP eligibility for wealthier people.

The battle over SCHIP could be a preview. Already, the Democratic presidential candidates have made health care “reform” a signature issue. While the Democrats might have learned their lessons from the early 1990s and refrained from coming out explicitly for government health care, expansions of programs such as SCHIP, coupled with a new program or two, would achieve a similar end.

Entitlements already represent a threat to our economic future. There is little doubt that an expanded SCHIP program is but more gasoline on that fire. The failure of Republicans to fight to block the federalization of health care is a worrying thing. It’s going to be hard enough for the Republicans to gain ground in 2008, but harder still absent a stand on the deep principles on which the party won the mandates it has enjoyed in recent decades.