The big non-congressional political story of the last week here in the Emerald City was Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan’s announcement that he was dropping out of the Maryland gubernatorial race due to a recent diagnosis of clinical depression. Duncan also emphatically endorsed his former primary rival, Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley, who will now get a clear shot at incumbent Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich, and vice-versa. I used to live in MoCo, and have also been around Duncan at DLC events, and appreciate him as a first-rate administrator who has come to dominate political life in a jurisdiction whose citizens, heavily including top-level federal employees, have extremely high standards for local government services. I obviously wish him well in his recovery from depression, but at the same time am relieved that he has abandoned an uphill fight against O’Malley that definitely required a negative campaign for which Duncan was temperamentally unsuited, and that would have helped Ehrlich in the general election. As for O’Malley, he has his detractors in Baltimore and elsewhere, but the man really does possess a notable “it” factor that led a lot of people to start talking about him as a potential presidential candidate about two minutes after his first election as mayor. His personal charisma is authentic and strong, and not only because women tend to find him very attractive (I once asked a young female colleague what she thought about O’Malley, and she simply smiled and said: “Meeow!” Appropriately, O’Malley is very scrupulous about avoiding situations where he is alone with women to whom he is not married). In fact, O’Malley, along with Barack Obama, has long been a candidate for the much-longed-for Bobby Kennedy role in the Democratic Party: a politician whose appeal transcends party or faction and potentially could create a new majority. Like RFK and Obama, O’Malley is hard to shoehorn ideologically; he’s always been close to the DLC (hosting two of our annual meetings), but he also endorsed Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Like Bill Clinton, the closest thing we’ve had to Bobby since his assassination, O’Malley is a policy innovator who is completely open to new ideas, wherever they come from. But now he must face Ehrlich, the guy who in 2002 snuffed the potential national political career of RFK’s actual daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Ehrlich will almost certainly run a nasty negative campaign against O’Malley, and the mayor’s ability to rise above the fray and seek new allies for the progressive cause will be tested as never before.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 8: How Obamacare Undermined Republican Appetite for Medicaid Cuts
There’s a new and important problem facing Republicans as they seek to hammer Medicaid yet again, as I explained at New York:
In the long Paul Ryan era of Republican budget-cutting efforts (when Ryan was House Budget Committee chairman and then House Speaker), Medicaid was always on the chopping block. And when the program became a key element of Democratic efforts to expand health-care coverage in the Affordable Care Act sponsored by Republicans’ top enemy, Barack Obama, Medicaid’s status as the program tea-party Republicans wanted to kill most rose into the stratosphere. No wonder that the last time the GOP had a governing trifecta, in 2017, there was no single “big beautiful bill” to implement Trump’s entire agenda, but instead an initial drive to “repeal and replace Obamacare” along with measures to deeply and permanently cut Medicaid. Rolling back health coverage for those people was Job One.
So now that Trump has returned to office with another trifecta in Congress, an alleged mandate, and a big head of steam that has overcome every inhibition based on politics, the law, or the Constitution, you’d figure that among the massive federal cuts being pursued through every avenue imaginable, deep Medicaid cuts would be the ultimate no-brainer for Republicans. Indeed, the budgetary arithmetic of Trump’s agenda all but demands big Medicaid “savings,” which is why the House budget resolution being implemented right now calls for cuts in the neighborhood of $600–$800 billion. And it’s clear that the very powerful House Freedom Caucus, thought to be especially near and dear to the president’s heart, is rabid for big Medicaid cuts.
To be sure, the extremely narrow GOP margin in the House means that so-called “moderate” Republicans (really just Republicans in marginal districts) who are chary of big Medicaid cuts are one source of intraparty pushback on this subject. But the shocking and arguably more important dynamic is that some of Trump’s most intense MAGA backers are pushing back too. OG Trump adviser Stephen Bannon issued a warning in February, as The New Republic’s Edith Olmsted reported:
“Steve Bannon, former architect of the MAGA movement turned podcaster, warned that Republicans making cuts to Medicaid would affect members of Donald Trump’s fan club.
“On the Thursday episode of War Room, while gushing over massive government spending cuts, Bannon warned that cutting Medicaid specifically would prove unpopular among the working-class members of Trump’s base, who make up some of the 80 million people who get their health care through that program.
“’Medicaid, you got to be careful, because a lot of MAGA’s on Medicaid. I’m telling you, if you don’t think so, you are deeeeeead wrong,’ Bannon said. ‘Medicaid is going to be a complicated one. Just can’t take a meat ax to it, although I would love to.’”
Bannon didn’t comment on the irony that it was the hated Obamacare that extended Medicaid eligibility deep into the MAGA ranks (with voters in deep-red Idaho, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Utah insisting on taking advantage of it), making it a dangerous target for GOP cuts. But in any event, particularly given Trump’s occasional promises that he’d leave Medicaid alone (which didn’t keep him from supporting the deep 2017 cuts), there existed some MAGA sentiment for finding “savings” elsewhere.
The volume of this sentiment went up sharply when one of the flavor-of-the-year right-wing “influencers,” Trump buddy Laura Loomer (reportedly fresh from laying waste to the National Security Council staff) went after a conservative think-tanker who was advising HFC types on how to savage Medicaid, per Politico:
“In a social media post Monday, Loomer called Brian Blase, the president of Paragon Health Institute, a ‘RINO Saboteur’ for helping draft a letter circulated by 20 House conservatives that advocated for deep cuts to Medicaid in the GOP’s domestic policy megabill.
“’In a shocking betrayal of President Donald Trump’s unwavering commitment to America’s working-class families, and his promise to protect Medicaid, [Brian Blase] … is spearheading a dangerous campaign to undermine the Republican Party’s midterm prospects,’ Loomer said on X.”
Loomer’s blast at Blase was clearly a shot across the bow of the House Freedom Caucus and other Republicans who are lusting for Medicaid cuts and/or are focused on deficit reduction as a major goal. She called Medicaid “a program critical to the heartland voters who propelled Donald Trump to his election victories” and warned that Medicaid cuts could badly damage Republicans in the 2026 midterms.
The perpetually shrewd health-care analyst Jonathan Cohn thinks MAGA ambivalence about Medicaid cuts could be a game-changer. After citing data from Trump’s own pollster showing support for Medicaid among Trump supporters, Cohn noted this could have an impact in Congress:
“Trump himself has said he is going to protect Medicaid — although, as is always the case, it’s hard to know exactly what he means, how seriously he means it, or how much thought he has even given to the matter.
“But Trump’s own uncertainty here is telling, just like the pushback to Medicaid cuts from the likes of Loomer. Together they are a sign of just how much the politics around government health care programs has changed in the last few years — and why this piece of Trump’s big, beautiful bill is proving so tough to pass.”
It wouldn’t be that surprising if there’s a thunderbolt from the White House on this subject before the House budget reconciliation bill is finalized. If there isn’t, nervous House Republicans may be forced to read his ever-changing mind.