Like shooting fish in a barrel some days..
He was lying.
as governor of Texas, Bush used the legislative calendar to stall two years before implementing the program, then fought to limit the number of children covered. The Texas Legislature meets every other year and had adjourned before Congress enacted and funded the program in 1997. Bush could have signed an executive order and begun enrolling qualified children. Instead, he appointed a committee to study the program, buying time until the next legislative session. When the legislature convened in 1999, Bush recommended implementing the S-CHIP, but with enrollment requirements so stringent that hundreds of thousands of qualified children would have been locked out of the program.