With right-wing zealots taking over the legislature even as the state’s demographics shift leftward, Texas has become the nation’s bellwether.
Texans see themselves as a distillation of the best qualities of America: friendly, confident, hardworking, patriotic, neurosis-free. Outsiders see us as the nation’s id, a place where rambunctious and disavowed impulses run wild. Texans, it is thought, mindlessly celebrate individualism, and view government as a kind of kryptonite that weakens the entrepreneurial muscles.
We’re reputed to be braggarts; careless with money and our personal lives; a little gullible, but dangerous if crossed; insecure, but obsessed with power and prestige.
.. Texas has been growing at a stupefying rate for decades. The only state with more residents is California, and the number of Texans is projected to double by 2050, to 54.4 million, almost as many people as in California and New York combined. Three Texas cities—Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio—are already among the top ten most populous in the country.
.. For more than a century, Texas was under Democratic rule. The state was always culturally conservative, religious, and militaristic, but a strain of pragmatism kept it from being fully swept up in racism and right-wing ideology. Economic populism, especially in the rural areas, offered a counterweight to the capitalists in the cities.
.. In 1978, Bill Clements became the first Republican governor of Texas since Reconstruction. To help him reach constituents, Clements hired a young direct-mail wizard named Karl Rove, who became a central figure in Texas’s transformation from blue to red. Rove attributes the change to the growth of the suburbs and the gradual movement of the rural areas into the Republican column: “They went from being economic populists, who thought the system was rigged against them by Wall Street, to being social and conservative populists, who thought that government was the problem.”
.. Moderate and conservative Democratic politicians followed the voters to the Republican Party. Rick Perry, for one, served three terms in the Texas House as a Democrat, and even campaigned for Al Gore in his 1988 Presidential run, before changing parties, in 1989. In 1994, Texas elected its last statewide Democrat. “It was a complete rout of a political party,”
This dirty little secret is the real reason why repeal is so hard for Republicans
The Affordable Care Act has widely been held aloft as one of the leading drivers of the deepening polarization of American political life — it has been bitterly fought over for years and has loomed as a great embodiment of all that ideologically divides the two parties. Yet in a strange twist, the GOP debate over repeal has actually revealed that there is a surprising amount of hidden consensus on health care.
.. nutshell, what the debate has really shown is that the passage and implementation of the ACA has given rise to a latent majority in Congress — or at least one in the Senate — that has more or less made peace with the ACA’s spending and regulatory architecture and its fundamental ideological goals
.. GOP Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas that neatly illustrates the point. Moran is a GOP loyalist who previously headed the GOP Senate campaign arm and sits firmly in the mainstream of today’s GOP. Yet even he is having trouble supporting the GOP bill.
.. He did not describe the task facing Republicans as repeal; it was “repair, replace, whatever language people are using.”
Pressed by activists and voters, Moran said that he did not want to cut back Medicaid. “I have concern about people with disabilities, the frail and elderly,” Moran said. “I also know that if we want health care in rural places and across Kansas, Medicare and Medicaid need to compensate for the services they provide.”
After the town hall meeting, Moran told reporters the version of the GOP’s bill that he opposed put too much of Medicaid at risk.
.. He is suggesting that, while able-bodied adults might allegedly be scamming their way onto the Medicaid expansion, this issue should not be taken to justify the deeper cuts to Medicaid. And this, as Weigel notes, unfolded in one of “the reddest parts of a deep red state.”
.. The bottom line is that Republicans who currently oppose the Senate bill object to it because it would roll back federal spending in a way that would hurt millions and millions of people. This includes Moran and moderates such as Dean Heller of Nevada, Susan Collins of Maine, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, and Rob Portman of Ohio, all of whom have made variations of this argument. Some, such as Collins and Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, have even objected on the grounds that this would finance a massive tax cut for the wealthy, and that this is indefensible.
.. All of this is dramatically at odds with the ludicrous spin coming from GOP leaders such as John Cornyn of Texas and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who argue that the millions left uncovered under the GOP bill will be choosing that plight, because they will have been liberated from the hated ACA mandate.
.. To summarize, Republicans are arguing both that
- millions won’t actually be hurt by these Medicaid cuts, either because they aren’t really cuts, or because everyone will have “access” to health care later; and that
- if many millions of people go without coverage who would otherwise have been covered, they did so by choice.
it is of course possible to make a principled argument against the mandate, Republicans are doing something else entirely: They are hiding behind their arguments against the mandate to evade acknowledging the true human toll their proposed Medicaid cuts would inflict.
What this really means is that they are basically fine with rolling back the ACA’s massive coverage expansion to facilitate a massive tax cut for the rich, but just won’t say so out loud.
But all indications are that moderate Republican senators — and even senators such as Moran — are not fine with this outcome.
Now, these objecting senators may still end up supporting a revised GOP bill in the end, due to party pressures and other factors. But if they do, they will only justify it by pretending that a few additional last-minute dollars (in relative terms) added to the bill would put a meaningful dent in the enormous coverage loss
.. This would mean their current objections were insincere.
Republican Senators Face Pushback From Governors on the Health Bill
That means Republican leaders must flip at least seven of the nine GOP senators who have already said publicly they oppose the bill, a challenge compounded by the recess.
.. In a recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 16% of respondents said the version of the bill passed by the House was a good idea.
.. Mr. Hutchinson has advocated that the health bill either maintain higher levels of funding or exempt elderly and disabled people from caps on Medicaid spending. Without the extra federal help, he said, he would be forced to end the Medicaid expansion immediately.
.. “Providing extra flexibility to the governors to design programs which are suited for their particular populations is a good thing,” Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, told reporters last week. “But we cannot pretend that giving me all the flexibility in the world will allow me to provide meaningful coverage to the same people who have it today if you give me half as much money.”
Going Small on Health Care
The Democratic bill in 2010 delivered significantly to the party’s base; the Republican bill in 2017 delivers significantly only to the party’s donors.
.. In order to mitigate its unpopularity, Senate Republicans keep making their bill more like, well, Obamacare, which raises the question of why they’re attempting something so complex for such a modest end.
.. the smaller bill would repeal the individual mandate requiring the purchase of health insurance. It would replace it, as the Senate bill does, with a continuous-coverage requirement — a waiting period to purchase insurance if you go without it for more than two months.
.. Instead of wringing almost $800 billion out of Medicaid over 10 years, it would try to reduce the program’s spending by $250 billion — just enough for deficit neutrality.
.. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. Eliminate the hated mandate, keep the exchanges stable, cut a few health care taxes, and pull Medicaid spending downward. Pass the package, declare victory, and pivot to tax reform.
.. Republicans could campaign in 2018 on the credible claim that they had maintained Obamacare’s coverage for most people who wanted it, while reducing its burdens on those who don’t.
.. the Republican Party is too divided on health care, too incompetently “led” by its president, and too confused about the details of health policy to do something that’s big and sweeping and also smart and decent and defensible.