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[Orema]

Opinion: Biden is quietly erasing one of Trump’s cruelest legacies


President Biden on Dec. 22. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)

It has been overshadowed by months of Democratic infighting and the searing national debate over Jan. 6, but the Biden administration is quietly erasing one of the cruelest legacies of Donald Trump’s presidency. This is a genuine achievement, in both symbolic and practical terms.

On Thursday, the administration rejected Georgia’s proposal to impose work requirements and premiums on Medicaid recipients. This was effectively the last nail in the coffin of Trump’s zombie attempt to make Medicaid more cumbersome and bureaucratic, in hopes of knocking as many people off health coverage as possible.

When Biden took office, nearly 20 mostly Republican-controlled states were in the process of crafting work requirements for Medicaid, on which 76 million Americans rely.

Now, Medicaid work requirements are all but dead in all those states.

That erases a legacy of the Trump administration, which had invited states to submit proposals to impose such requirements. Proposals were eventually approved for 12 states — all with Republican legislatures, governors or both — while a half-dozen others were pending when Trump left office.

In the most visible case, under Arkansas’s 2018 requirements, nearly 17,000 people lost health coverage. That wasn’t necessarily because they weren’t working. It was mainly because it was so difficult to satisfy all the reporting requirements.

Which is a feature, not a bug, of work requirements. By forcing recipients to prove they’re working and navigate a bureaucratic maze to stay in the program, the state gives itself an excuse to kick off those who make a paperwork mistake or miss a reporting deadline.

Biden’s reversal began just after he took office. In February, the administration informed states that it was preparing to withdraw approvals for work requirements granted under Trump.

One by one over the following months, those approvals were either rescinded by the administration, held up by court challenges, or delayed by state governments that expected the policy reversal (in Utah, officials suspended requirements due to the pandemic). Georgia was the last state where approval for this policy was still in force, though Republican states may still wage court battles.

Legacy of cruelty

Trump’s effort to impose Medicaid work requirements was part of a much larger campaign to undermine and roll back our country’s fitful advance toward universal health care. This constituted an even broader legacy of cruelty, and arguably outright betrayal.

That’s because Trump campaigned in 2016 as a corrective to Paul Ryan-style Republicans who had treated destroying the social safety net as a quasi-religious calling. Trump vowed that “everybody’s got to be covered,” and insisted no one would die on the street, uninsured.

But once in office, Trump embraced GOP anti-safety-net zealotry by going all in on the Republican effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act. Driven by hatred of Barack Obama, he endlessly raged that the ACA was a “disaster.”

That culminated in the 2017 repeal attempt, which fortunately failed. Stymied in that effort, which would have taken coverage away from millions on the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, Trump sought to weaken the safety net via other administrative means, such as these Medicaid work requirements.

And so, in erasing those requirements, Biden is also erasing a larger hangover of Trumpian cruelty.

The ACA is expanding

This legacy is being erased in another way. Under Biden, the same ACA that Trump tried to destroy is expanding and moving toward realizing its potential. A record number of more than 13 million people have signed up for 2022 coverage on the exchanges.

A key reason for this is that the covid-19 rescue plan that Biden signed in March expanded the number of people eligible for ACA subsidies and beefed up subsidies for those already eligible. As Margot Sanger-Katz details in the New York Times, this is a real achievement: It substantially reimagines and expands the ACA amid a pandemic, meaning the ACA is rising to an emergency occasion.

Still, this achievement is at risk. The ACA expansion in the rescue package expires at the end of next year, and while Democrats want to extend it in the Build Back Better bill, a certain West Virginia senator remains opposed. That would be a policy and political disaster for Democrats.

“If Democrats aren’t able to extend it, millions of people will get notice of huge premium increases right before the midterm election,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told us.

Making progress

In short, the pandemic has not dimmed the GOP desire to roll back that ACA expansion and undermine Medicaid, even as we face a new covid surge. But now, with the Georgia decision, work requirements are effectively dead — as long as a Democrat remains in the White House.

Biden has made serious mistakes with the pandemic, in particular the failure to secure enough covid tests when need has exploded. But he’s making progress in getting more Americans covered, replacing the Trumpian impulse to impose suffering for the sin of being poor with the principle that every American ought to have access to health care.

“Biden has quietly been moving us closer to universal coverage, picking up on a cause Democrats have been pursuing since the early 20th Century,” Jonathan Cohn, author of an excellent history of the ACA, told us. “A big part of that has been undoing the legacy of Trump.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...-trump-policy/

[homoe]

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene rants against ‘fake religion’ Kwanzaa as Black holiday begins.

Dave Goldiner, New York Daily News.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has denounced Kwanzaa as a “fake religion” just as millions of Black people start to celebrate the weeklong holiday.

The far-right Georgia lawmaker berated the national College Republicans for “pandering and BS” after the GOP group tweeted a seemingly innocuous happy holiday message. “Stop. It’s a fake religion created by a psychopath,” Greene said. “People are tired of pandering and BS.” She was apparently deriding Kwanzaa founder Prof. Maulana Karenga, who was convicted of felony assault in the 1960′s in what he says was a politically motivated prosecution spurred by his involvement in Black nationalist politics.

Greene suggested that the College Republicans should avoid political correctness if it wants to galvanize the conservative base of the GOP. “You aren’t bringing in new voters, you are turning them away,” she added.

The College Republicans did not respond to Greene’s criticism about the tweet, which itself misspelled the name of the holiday as “Kwanza.”

Kwanzaaa, which lasts for seven days, is a holiday festival, not a religion as Greene claims. It was created in 1966 as a way to allow Black people worldwide to celebrate their common African roots.

Former President Trump tweeted a similar “Happy Kwanzaa” message during his stint in the White House, but Greene did not criticize her political hero for the greeting it should be noted!

[homoe]

What a difference a year makes...

[homoe]

Jacob Chansley, the convicted Jan. 6 rioter also known as the “QAnon Shaman,” now claims he was just trying to help during the insurrection.

“I actually tried to, on more than one occasion, calm the crowd,” he told “Inside Edition.” “But it just didn’t work.”

Chansley also said that he regrets not doing more to keep the peace as supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block the certification of the 2020 election results. However, multiple videos and images showed him howling and chanting his way through the Capitol and inside the Senate Chamber.

Prosecutors said he yelled, “Times up, motherfuckers,” and left a note on then-Vice President Mike Pence’s desk that said, “It’s only a matter of time. Justice is coming.”

Again what a difference a year makes! This loudmouth MotherF*^$er has turned into a sniffling little bitch!

[Orema]

Dick Cheney returned to the House and received a warm welcome . . . from Democrats. Including me. Who knew the day would come?

This has had me thinking of one of my favorite SNL openings ….



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF3dnVCTxBY

[CherylNYC]

I didn’t anticipate the level of fury and aggression I would feel on Thursday's anniversary. I’m still spiraling through perseverating revenge fantasies.

Once I talked myself down off the ledge, however, I was able to enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_IxT2ei9gU

[homoe]

The list of what threatens to end the Democrats’ control of the Senate is familiar: History says the White House’s party usually loses seats in midterms. The president’s low approval ratings in battleground states — even lower than his weak national ratings — portend trouble. Voters now say they prefer Republican control of Congress. And in several states, Republicans have made it harder to vote and are placing partisans in control of the vote-counting.

But there’s another possibility that should also have the Democrats reaching for the Maalox: A random act of fate could turn the Senate over to the Republicans not next January, but next summer, or next month, or next week. An illness or death could well trigger a political earthquake — by almost instantly switching control of the nation’s top legislative body.

States have a range of laws about replacing a departed senator, but the large majority — 37 — call on the governor to pick a successor. Of those, only seven require the governor to pick someone in the same party. So there are 30 states where the governor can pick whatever new senator he or she wants.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazi...manchin-526755