Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri on Monday urged his Republican colleagues to reject deep cuts to Medicaid as part of legislation to implement President Trump’s ambitious domestic agenda, including a plan to cut more than $4 trillion in taxes.
In an opinion piece published in The New York Times, Mr. Hawley declared that cutting funding for a program that provides health insurance to more than 70 million low-income Americans, including 1 million people in his state, would be “morally wrong” and “politically suicidal.”
“Republicans need to open their eyes: Our voters support social insurance programs,” Mr. Hawley wrote. “More than that, our voters depend on those programs.”
His plea comes a day after House Republicans released a plan that would cut an estimated $715 billion from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act and could leave 8.6 million people uninsured, although the proposal does not include the more drastic cuts that fiscal hard-liners were demanding. He argued his opposition to the cuts aligns with Mr. Trump’s own repeated promises to not “touch” the program in any way.
Mr. Hawley has carved a lane for himself as the sole Republican populist voice in the Senate. He has repeatedly diverged from his party by, for instance, embracing policy proposals that would cap insulin costs at $25 a month, and he was the sole Republican to vote earlier this year in favor of limiting bank overdraft fees to $5.
He also has accused Republican institutionalists of prioritizing the interests of wealthy Americans and corporations at the expense of the working-class voters who formed the wave of populism that sent Mr. Trump to the White House. Unlike most of his party, Mr. Hawley has refrained from calls to extend the corporate tax cuts that Mr. Trump enacted in his first term, saying he was skeptical that they did much to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States or incentivize corporations to treat workers better.
“If Republicans want to be a working-class party — if we want to be a majority party — we must ignore calls to cut Medicaid and start delivering on America’s promise for America’s working people,” Mr. Hawley wrote.
Maya C. Miller covers Congress as part of the Times Newsroom Fellowship, a program for journalists early in their careers. She is based in Washington.
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