A Case Study in Republican Perfidy
Oklahoma voters took a smart step. Republicans are trying desperately to wreak their vengeance.
What’s the matter with Oklahoma? It is now a very Republican State. In 1914, 175 Socialists won election to local offices. As I type this, its delegation to Congress is entirely Republican. Somehow, it entirely lost its Populist character.
It is currently undergoing an experiment in real time that should fascinate any student of politics in the United States. The substantive issue is expansion of Medicaid. A useful, if dated, account of the issue of Medicaid expansion is available here. Expanding Medicaid was always the smart choice, for multiple reasons, but good Republicans hate the idea, coming as it did with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which provides disproportionate benefits to African Americans, so “white supremacist” Republicans have to hate it. They dreamed up the ridiculous excuse that the federal government might suddenly stop providing the subsidy that the ACA offers, leaving individual states stuck with all of the cost. Never mind that nothing of the sort has ever happened in our history. This is rank ideological nonsense. Being under the sway of dumb, racist Republican elected officials, Medicaid expansion did not occur in Oklahoma.
Until now. In June 2020, voters in Oklahoma barely — by one percent — approved a state initiative to expand Medicaid. This is fascinating. The disparity is not jarring. The vote on the referendum showed a marked split between the two largest cities in the state, which voted in favor for the most part, and rural areas, which mostly voted against it. The initiative had a national organization helping it, the Fairness Project, collecting signatures to put it on the ballot and advocating yes votes during the campaign. This must have helped against the vocal opposition of the State’s Trump loving, stupid Republican governor, Kevin Stitt.
Stitt persisted with ridiculous claims about what Medicaid expansion would cost the state. This problem has not arisen in any other state and ignores the obvious point that Medicaid money comes from the general federal budget, meaning that refusing expansion is also refusing money any state’s tax payers pay in federal taxes that could help everyone in the state, because Medicaid expansion reduces health care costs generally. The State Question put the expansion in Oklahoma into the State’s constitution, so no ordinary statute can reverse it.
In the 2021 legislative session, the Oklahoma legislature had the task of funding the expansion. In the meantime, Stitt pulled a fast one and ordered the State agency that manages Medicaid to hire private contractors to manage the program, which opponents pointed out would add an unnecessary cost and likely limit the services Medicaid provides in Oklahoma. The legislature passed a bill to put restrictions on what private Medicaid providers could do, which Stitt allowed to become law without his signature, criticizing it as he did so.
Then — whiplash! — the state supreme court delivered an opinion, 6 to 3, finding that the state agency lacked authority to hire private managers for the Medicaid program, invalidating Stitt’s fast move. In the middle of this high level fight over law and policy, enrollment opened for expanded Medicaid in Oklahoma. There was some concern that the story about the supreme court’s opinion might confuse potential enrollees, but that does not seem to have been the case.
What makes this a fascinating case study is that a state with mostly Republican elected officials and Republican majorities in both houses of its state legislature would still choose the not Republican option for a major public policy issue. The election, in summer 2020, likely had a low turnout. In the 2020 presidential election, Oklahoma had the lowest turnout of any state in the republic, which is a comment on Republican governance by itself.
Regardless, this is a date point, not a super strong one, but a point all the same, in favor of the proposition that racist Republican officials advocate policies that harm the people who elect them, who are yet sometimes capable of adopting policies that will help them, if Republican officials do not have direct control of the process. It points up just how harmful stupid, ideological Republicans are to anyone who has the misfortune to live with their malfeasance, and the possibility of peeling off more voters from “white supremacist” Republicans.
Fascinating.