If you’ve been following the Virginia’s gubernatorial contest, which has entered its final stage, you have probably noticed that Republican candidate Jerry (Never Met Him) Kilgore has returned with a vengeance to a message warning Virginians that illegal immigrants are flooding the Commonwealth, spreading gang violence, promoting al Qaeda, and speaking foreign tongues and so forth.It’s certainly predictable. Ol’ Jerry’s losing ground in virtually every poll. His try-em-and-fry-em Death Penalty ads have largely backfired. His party and his president are like millstones around his neck. And he appears to be losing support most lethally in Northern Virginia, where earlier polls had him running neck-and-neck with Democrat Tim Kaine.So not surprisingly, Jerry’s handlers have decided to stake the ranch on the belief that concerns about illegal immigration in Northern Virginia can give their candidate the crucial boost he needs.I’ve written about this issue in the Viriginia campaign here and here, and won’t repeat that analysis today, but if you want to understand why immigration is suddenly a hot topic in the South, and especially in suburbs and exurbs in the South, check out this new article by Clay Risen on The New Republic’s site. As Clay explains, some of the highest percentage increases in immigrant populations are in southern states, including those far from any border. And it’s no surprise that southern Republicans are leaping on this issue in state after state–a trend that will definitely accelerate tremendously if ol’ Jerry wins and the post-election analysis shows anti-immigrant demagoguery was a factor.The main thing I’d add to Clay’s analysis is how risky the deployment of this issue is for the GOP. Ol’ Jerry’s rhetoric (other than the absurd claims of al Qaeda connections) isn’t that far from the kind of talk that backfired on Republicans in California during the 1990s, making their candidates anathema to Latino voters. And it certainly doesn’t fit in well with Karl Rove’s famous focus on these voters as a potential building-block for a Republican majority. But here’s the deal: the southern states where immigrant-bashing is spreading like topsy are places where immigrant populations are large enough to be conspicious, but have not developed into a serious political force of their own.Thus, politicians like ol’ Jerry believe they can use this toxic issue to wedge exurban and rural voters without paying any serious price elsewhere. And without question, Republican pols in the rest of the region will be watching the results very closely, with cookie-cutters in hand.So, my fellow Virginians, if the prospect of four years of lousy and hyper-partisan government isn’t enough to motivate you to get off your butts and send ol’ Jerry into retirement, consider your responsibility to the rest of the country for punishing demagogues and putting the fear of God into those who will otherwise use every nasty tactic that seems to work.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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March 24: The Republican Case Against Medicaid Expansion Continues to Crumble
There’s another turn in a story we’ve all been following for over a decade, so I wrote it up at New York:
The Affordable Care Act was signed into law 13 years ago, and the Medicaid expansion that was central to the law still hasn’t been implemented in all 50 states. But we are seeing steady, if extremely slow, progress in the effort to give people who can’t afford private insurance but don’t qualify for traditional Medicaid access to crucial health services. The U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the ACA also made Medicaid expansion optional for states. Twenty-four states accepted the expansion when it became fully available at the beginning of 2014, and that number has steadily expanded, with the most recent burst of forward momentum coming from ballot initiatives in red states like Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Utah. Now a 40th state is in the process of climbing on board: North Carolina. As the Associated Press reports, legislation is finally headed toward the desk of Governor Roy Cooper:
“A Medicaid expansion deal in North Carolina received final legislative approval on Thursday, capping a decade of debate over whether the closely politically divided state should accept the federal government’s coverage for hundreds of thousands of low-income adults. …
“When Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, a longtime expansion advocate, signs the bill, it should leave 10 states in the U.S. that haven’t adopted expansion. North Carolina has 2.9 million enrollees in traditional Medicaid coverage. Advocates have estimated that expansion could help 600,000 adults.”
So what changed? Basically, over time the fiscal arguments North Carolina Republicans used to oppose the expansion began sounding increasingly ridiculous, AP suggests:
“GOP legislators passed a law in 2013 specifically preventing a governor’s administration from seeking expansion without express approval by the General Assembly. But interest in expansion grew over the past year as lawmakers concluded that Congress was neither likely to repeal the law nor raise the low 10% state match that coverage requires.
“A financial sweetener contained in a COVID-19 recovery law means North Carolina also would get an estimated extra $1.75 billion in cash over two years if it expands Medicaid. Legislators hope to use much of that money on mental health services.”
In other words, the GOP Cassandras warning that the wily Democrats would cut funding for the expansion in Congress once states were hooked turned out to be absolutely wrong. Indeed, the very sweet deal offered in the original legislation got even sweeter thanks to the above-mentioned COVID legislation. States like North Carolina appeared to be leaving very good money on the table for no apparent reason other than partisanship, seasoned with some conservative hostility toward potential beneficiaries. In this case, GOP legislators finally reversed course without much excuse-making. The AP reports:
“A turning point came last May when Senate leader Phil Berger, a longtime expansion opponent, publicly explained his reversal, which was based largely on fiscal terms.
“In a news conference, Berger also described the situation faced by a single mother who didn’t make enough money to cover insurance for both her and her children, which he said meant that she would either end up in the emergency room or not get care. Expansion covers people who make too much money for conventional Medicaid but not enough to benefit from heavily subsidized private insurance.
“’We need coverage in North Carolina for the working poor,’ Berger said at the time.”
That, of course, has been true all along. Final legislative approval of the expansion was delayed for a while due to an unrelated dispute over health-facility regulations. And the expansion cannot proceed until a state budget is passed. But it’s finally looking good for Medicaid expansion in a place where Democrats and Republicans are bitterly at odds on a wide range of issues.
There remain ten states that have not yet expanded Medicaid; eight are Republican “trifecta” states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming) and two others have Republican-controlled legislatures (Kansas and Wisconsin). Perhaps the peculiar mix of stupidity and malice that keeps state lawmakers from using the money made available to them by Washington to help their own people will abate elsewhere soon.