IS THE GOP'S PLAN FOR GUTTING MEDICAID ALSO ITS PLAN FOR GUTTING DEMOCRACY?

The Republican Party intends to cut at least $880 billion from Medicaid in this year's budget. Jason Sattler thinks he knows how this will be accomplished, if it happens:

The GOP now has its ideal model for denying Americans the Medicaid they deserve from Georgia, which, under Republican leadership, expanded Medicaid in the worst possible way with all the paperwork “requirements” that were embedded in the 2017 proposed cuts and will be in the 2025 bill.

ProPublica reports on the results:

... Only 6,500 participants have enrolled in the first 18 months of the program — roughly 75% fewer than the state had estimated for year one....

“Thousands of others never finished applying, according to the state’s data, as reports of technical glitches mounted,” ProPublica reported. “The state also never hired enough people to help residents sign up or to verify that participants are actually working, as Georgia required, federal officials and state workers said.”

Here's how the combination of onerous requirements and bad tech works in practice, according to ProPublica:

Paul Mikell lives in an area outside Atlanta without reliable internet service — and he doesn’t have the income for a phone plan with unlimited data. It takes him more than an hour each month to upload the employment documents necessary to reconfirm his eligibility, often using the free Wi-Fi at his public library.

Sometimes, Mikell said, the task has stretched days, even a whole week, because the Pathways verification portal freezes or crashes. One time, he said, he waited eight days for customer support to retrieve a password and restore his access.

I'm sure this is the future for Medicaid recipients if President Trump and congressional Republicans get their way. I assume that most white people who struggle to navigagte this system will assume that it works just fine for non-whites (and immigrants). They'll conclude that the president they love, Donald Trump, tried to fix it, but the wily Deep State is difficult to defeat. They won't blame him.

I wonder if this is also how Republicans intend to make voting next to impossible for millions of Americans.

Republicans don't believe in the social safety net, so they're happy to remove anyone they can from the Medicaid rolls, regardless of race. In Georgia, they clearly assume that they're not harming enough of their own voters to put their jobs at risk. But the Republican plan for voting that's been introduced in Congress seems a bit risky for the GOP. The Center for American Progress explains:

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives. This legislation would require all Americans to prove their citizenship status by presenting documentation—in person—when registering to vote or updating their voter registration information. Specifically, the legislation would require the vast majority of Americans to rely on a passport or birth certificate to prove their citizenship. While this may sound easy for many Americans, the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.

Remember, you'd have to do all this every time you re-register to vote -- for instance, after moving.

Why would Republicans want to do all this when many of the people who'd struggle to register are their own voters?

Nationwide, approximately 69 million women could not use their birth certificate to prove their identity or citizenship status under the SAVE Act....

[A] Pew survey found that ... Democratic and Democratic-leaning women are twice as likely as Republican and Republican-leaning women to have kept their maiden name, with only 7 percent of conservative Republican women reporting that they kept their last name. So while the legislation would unfairly disenfranchise women as a whole, the requirement to present a birth certificate would disproportionately disenfranchise conservative and Republican women....

Nationwide, approximately 146 million American citizens do not possess a passport....

In seven states, less than one-third of citizens have a valid passport: West Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. And only in four states do more than two-thirds of the citizens have a valid passport: New York, Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey. In West Virginia, the state with the lowest rate of citizen passport possession, only about 1 in 5 citizens—or 20.7 percent—possess this documentation....

Overall, data shows that high rates of passport ownership are predominantly concentrated in blue states, while low rates of passport ownership are overwhelmingly concentrated in red states.

I would have expected a Republican voting bill to target Democratic voters much more efficiently than this.

It may be that the SAVE Act is seen as just a messaging bill. Republicans know that they probably can't get seven Democratic votes in the Senate to break a filibuster, and then they can say that they tried to prevent voter fraud and fraud-loving Democrats prevented them. But why write the bill this way in the first place?

If it's somehow enacted, I assume the plan is to look the other way as Republican-run states make it easy for some voters to overcome the hurdles, while leaving other voters to struggle. Maybe there'll be plenty of voter registration navigators in red districts and not nearly as many in blue districts. Otherwise, I'm a bit puzzled.

For decades, since long before Trump entered politics, Republicans have railed against nonexistent electoral fraud and passed bills to give their party an edge in voting -- but always in a way that's meant to seem fair if you don't look at it too closely. (Most people don't.) I suspect that by 2026 the Trump administration will discard this approach and simply cancel the midterms, citing a mythical national emergency or something, or will refuse to recognize midterm results if they don't go the GOP's way. And while I firmly believe that the 2024 election wasn't rigged, for reasons I explained a few months ago, it's possible that there's a plan, undoubtedly involving Elon Musk and his child soldiers, to rig the next election.

But apart from that, the GOP plan for voting is both awful and not certain to accomplish the party's goals, unless it's meant to be accompanied by a two-tiered system of registration in GOP-controlled states, which is probably the case.