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The only thing more pathetic than a losing political party trying to relive its past glories is one foolishly reliving its most resounding failures. Incredibly, Wisconsin’s Republican legislators seem to think beginning to emerge from the deadly pandemic that ravaged the state’s economy is a terrific time to resume their failed battle against affordable health care.
Surely Republicans aren’t so dense they’ve already forgotten their disastrous 2018 midterm elections. That’s when Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives because voters were fed up with Republicans’ repeated attempts to destroy the health protections and insurance subsidies of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Protecting the ACA also propelled the Democratic sweep of every statewide Wisconsin election including Gov. Tony Evers’s defeat of Scott Walker and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s re-election. President Joe Biden’s record vote last year finally put a stake in the disastrous Trump presidency and led to narrow Democratic control of the Senate.
Now Biden has successfully passed the most sweeping public health and economic recovery legislation in U.S. history without a single Republican vote. It’s being welcomed by an overwhelming majority of Americans happy to receive $1,400 economic stimulus payments in their bank accounts. Soon 90% of families also will receive regular payments totaling $3,000 to $3,600 for every child. Spending that money will help revive the U.S. economy wrecked by the last president’s failure to control the pandemic.
GOP Out of Touch
That’s a really bad time for state Republicans to show they’re totally out of touch with the needs of the country, but that’s exactly what they’re doing. This involves another provision of Biden’s economic recovery plan. It will pay Wisconsin to expand BadgerCare Plus, the state’s Medicaid insurance program, by including poor folks with slightly higher incomes. Biden’s recovery plan offers generous incentives to the 12 states that refused to expand their Medicaid programs under the ACA.
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Those states are Wisconsin and mostly deep South states whose Republican legislatures have racist stereotypes about most “welfare” going to urban blacks when far more actually helps poor whites survive in Republican small towns and rural areas. Wisconsin would receive a whopping $1.6 billion over the next two years. Democrats call it an offer no intelligent state could refuse, but they may have overestimated the intelligence of Republican legislators and underestimated their hatred for poor people.
Wisconsin’s Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos says he won’t even consider increasing the number of people eligible for low-cost health insurance in Wisconsin no matter how big the bribe is because it would be “expanding welfare” and “trapping people in a life of poverty.” So Biden can just keep his $1.6 billion. That combines the Republican cruelty of denying low-cost health insurance for people who desperately need it with Republican financial irresponsibility of using state tax dollars to finance BadgerCare instead of a windfall of federal incentives protecting more of their constituents.
No Logic Here
Don’t try to understand the logic of Republican opposition to affordable health care because there isn’t any. A logical person might think providing affordable health care to all Americans would create safer, healthier communities and keep people out of poverty. But Republicans like Vos consider “welfare” a dirty word. It’s an epithet they use to describe any government program that helps anyone other than their own wealthy campaign contributors. Republicans claim they’re actually doing poor people a favor by slashing food stamps to feed their families and reducing unemployment benefits so they’ll learn the value of work whether anyone wants to hire them or not.
Republicans controlling Wisconsin’s legislature don’t seem to realize they’re living on borrowed time. They no longer represent the majority of state voters. They escaped the voter backlash that took out Scott Walker in 2018 because after they won total control of state government with Walker in 2010, Republicans used the new census to corruptly gerrymander the voting districts for their own legislative seats. Even when voters cast ballots for more Democratic legislative candidates than Republican candidates in 2018, Republicans still won a majority in Wisconsin’s Assembly and in the State Senate.
When dishonest political gerrymandering after 2010 throughout the country went to the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a terrible decision declaring federal courts had no role to play in redrawing state voting districts even if those districts were intentionally gerrymandered to disenfranchise voters. Don’t believe the media hype about Roberts as a moderate court hero. He’s written some of the court’s worst rightwing decisions striking down protections for voting rights and measures to end racial discrimination.
Wisconsin’s Republican legislators are about to lose their protection from state voters. A new census is coming and Evers will have a veto to block dishonest Republican gerrymandering. It’s already a new day in America under President Biden who actually believes in American democracy, voting rights and fair elections.
