Mencken! Thou shouldst be here at this hour. I didn’t start reading H.L. Mencken until middle age, partly because certain ugly aspects to his character came to light during my youth, partly because conservatives adopted his style, and partly because I didn’t like Mencken’s contempt toward the “booboisie.” But Mencken’s rudeness was the right antidote to the politically clueless 1920s, and it has a new relevance 100 years later.
“As democracy is perfected,” Mencken wrote in 1920, “the office [of the President] represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
You’ve probably heard that quote before. We could conduct a lively debate about when Mencken’s prophesy came true. In my opinion, it was in January 1981. (You must remember that before he was a secular saint, Ronald Reagan was a person whose forehead-smiting ignorance occasioned a steady stream of news stories.) If not Reagan, then certainly George W. Bush fulfilled Mencken’s prophecy. Which means I should have been used to the phenomenon by the time Trump came along. I am not.
The occasion for these sour observations is the Senate Republican majority’s version of the House-passed budget reconciliation bill, or anyway the most contentious parts of it (text; section-by-section summary; shorter summary). Like the House bill, the Senate version is premised on the moronic notion that you can cut taxes by $4 trillion and make it up by throwing a bunch of people off Medicaid. President Donald Trump says he believes this, and I’m inclined to believe that he believes this because he is—well, you know.
But the Senate is supposed to know better. George Washington reputedly said that the Senate, being less responsive to popular passions than the House, was like the saucer into which one pours coffee to cool it before drinking (that’s apparently something people used to do). But not a lot of cooling takes place in the Senate budget bill.
Cuts to the food stamp program are a little smaller in the Senate bill than in the House version, Bobby Kogan, a former Senate Budget Committee staffer, now at the Center for American Progress, told me. I phoned Kogan because the Congressional Budget Office and various nonprofits hadn’t yet had time to score the proposal. Where the House cuts nearly $300 billion, Kogan said, the Senate cuts more than $200 billion. But either way, Kogan explained, this would be the largest cut in the program’s history.
The Senate’s cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, however, are bigger than in the House bill—probably in excess of $900 billion, according to Kogan. The House bill cuts these programs by somewhere north of $800 billion, at a cost, according to the Yale School of Public Health, of 51,000 lives. As David Dayen explains bluntly in The American Prospect, “more people will die as a result of the Senate’s actions.”
These cuts aren’t just pathologically cruel, though they’re certainly that. They’re also politically moronic. As I explained last month, Medicaid has evolved from a small program with a politically powerless constituency into a large program covering much of the working class, thereby merging into the third rail of American politics already occupied by Social Security and Medicare.
As in the House bill, the Senate would impose a new Medicaid work requirement for recipients aged 18 to 64. States can put off implementing the work requirement until after the 2026 midterms (the deadline is December 31). That sounds devilishly clever until one learns that states will be required to notify recipients in danger of losing their benefits three months in advance. Even if states manage to delay that too, past Election Day, voters aren’t so dumb that they won’t find out about this and other Medicaid cuts well before. Democrats will be hollering about them from rooftops.
In fact, the public dislikes the budget bill already: a 42 percent plurality, according to a new Washington Post poll; and a 64 percent majority, according to a new Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Republicans can perhaps take solace in the KFF finding that 68 percent approve of the work requirement for Medicaid. But that dropped to 35 percent after it was explained that most Medicaid recipients work already.
We’ll likely see further changes to this measure before it becomes law, but some version of this bill is going to become law, doubling the budget deficit and throwing more than 16 million people off Medicaid. It will happen because congressional Republicans are terrified of displeasing Trump. They should be more terrified of displeasing voters, but they aren’t. So idiocy wins. We’ve seen moronic presidents before, but not a president who’s both stupid and mean. That’s a level of national debasement even Mencken didn’t anticipate. I’ll give the sage of Baltimore the last word: “In this world of sin and sorrow, there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”
The post Trump’s Cruel and Costly Budget Bill Just Got Even Worse appeared first on New Republic.
