'Pro-life' Mitt Romney stands up for smokers, against children

'Pro-life' Mitt Romney stands up for smokers, against children:

Mitt ponders what position to take today. (Joshua Lott/Reuters)

Greg Sargent poses a good question about Mitt Romney's support for children's health care. The Romney campaign has been going around asserting that the Obama administration raised taxes on "millions of Americans." When pressed to prove it, they pointed to a bunch of taxes—which haven't gone into effect yet—from the Affordable Care Act. The one that has is a 61-cent-per-pack increase in the federal excise tax on cigarettes. That tax funds an expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. So the obvious question, as posed by Sargent:

If Romney opposes this tax, does that mean he also favors rolling back the CHIP expansion?

You've got to love those "pro-life" Republicans, putting smokers above children because "freedom." (BTW, those are the same smokers to whom employers could deny health insurance coverage under the Blunt amendment, because "freedom"). So this is a really good question that some enterprising reporter should be asking the Romney camp. Does he stand with those Republicans and want to take away health care from millions of children? Or does he want to stick with socialized medicine and healthy kids?