Eight-year-old Zeek Taylor of Durham was the latest ambassador on Capitol Hill today to join the Democrats’ push to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

The House of Representatives is scheduled to vote this afternoon to override President Bush’s veto of a $35 billion expansion of the program to cover millions more children, reports Barb Barrett.

Supporters are thought to still be at least a dozen votes short of the total needed to override the veto, but that hasn’t stopped the lobbying.

Opponents say the proposed expansion is too lavish and would include middle-income children and young adults.

This morning, Zeek and his mother, Betty Taylor, faced a phalanx of cameras during a staged photo opportunity with his congressman, U.S. Rep. David Price, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

Zeek, a third-grader at Club Boulevard Elementary School, was born nearly three months premature and spent his early life in the neonatal unit at Duke University Medical Center. He is the 2007 ambassador for March of Dimes, which brought 400 people to Capitol Hill on Thursday to lobby for the bill.

Engulfed by both a brown leather chair and his own generously cut suit jacket, Zeek smiled quietly and stared up at the cameras as shutters whirred and Pelosi and Price parried shouted questions about Bush’s veto.

"I hate to say this in front of Zeek,” Pelosi said in answering one question, “but just because the president says something doesn’t make it so.”

And Price added: “The fact is, the president, on the issue of covering 10 million children, has different values. Maybe he would like to decide which of the children will be insured, and which will not, and maybe he’d like to be the one to tell them that.”

Read more after the jump.

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Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr engaged in some creative spin on their votes on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

They voted against a Democratic plan to expand the program, reports Rob Christensen. But their news release said: “U.S. Senators Elizabeth Dole and Richard Burr today called for a continuation of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, due to expire at the end of this month.”

"Dole and Burr today voted to protect the original SCHIP from a massive expansion of government-run health care funded by a tobacco tax hike that would disproportionately affect North Carolina’s economy.”

Isn’t that sort of like a father telling his son, that in order to protect your existing allowance from becoming bloated, I’m turning down your your request for an increase?

Richard Moore's plan to insure children would cost $120 million.

The state treasurer unveiled his plan Thursday to get more uninsured children on the Health Choice and Medicaid health care plans through incentives to hospitals and schools.

According to the Associated Press, the Carolina Cares for Children plan is mostly carrot with little stick. There would be no punishment for failing to include a child's insurance policy number on a state tax form, for example.

Moore also proposed expanding access to the State Children's Health Insurance Program to up to three times the federal poverty level, or $61,950 for a family of four. The limit is currently twice the poverty level.

The expansion is one reason he targeted President Bush in a recent online petition.

Bush has criticized expansion, saying children from higher income families are likely to have access to private insurance, the Charlotte Observer reports.