So, I was at work Monday on a column that appeared online-only Wednesday.
It presented a realistic--some said pessimistic--view of national Democratic prospects post-exoneration on collusion and post-inconclusiveness on obstruction.
You know--BMR and AMR, meaning before the Mueller report and after.
My point was that, absent any advancement in the corruption arena, Democrats were left to:
• Look silly by continuing to investigate where Robert Mueller had investigated.
• Hammer the failed Hillary Clinton refrain that Donald Trump was temperamentally unsuited for the presidency.
• Discuss issues, as if Trump were normal, on an economy that wasn't bad and international issues devoid of new war.
And then came the news.
The Trump administration's Justice Department had filed a motion in the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals asking the court to throw out the Affordable Care Act--all of it, at once, kaboom.
Within 24 hours, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in front of her Democratic caucus saying--I suspect --that the numbskulls had us pinned on Monday morning and let us up by Monday afternoon.
Apparently, the Trump administration is so beholden to rigid right-wing thinking that it is obliged to offer blanket resistance to federal assistance to people in their health care. That is all I can imagine.
Here's the story, and, if it's not clear to you, then seek clarification from Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, because she, being a devoted Trumpian, made Arkansas a co-plaintiff in this shame and outrage:
A Texas federal judge--meaning a right-winger--ruled some time back that, since the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld Obamacare's individual mandate on the basis that it was supported by a tax penalty for noncompliance, and thus by a tax, which was therefore within Congress' constitutional authority, and since the Republican Congress had subsequently zeroed out the penalty, then there remained no extant tax by which the individual mandate could stand legally.
The judge, going way overboard, threw out the whole ACA, including premium subsidies, federally mandated coverage for pre-existing conditions and the money for the state option of expanding Medicaid to provide health insurance to the working poor.
Now the matter is stayed on appeal.
Beyond being inhumane, the Trump administration filing Monday in favor of dumping all of Obamacare pelted manna on the Democrats.
It invited them to sound the alarm, credibly, that this president, unchecked, would leave cancer patients--or those in remission and worried about recurrence--without any federal guarantee of equitably priced insurance and at the whim of the various states, some of which, like Arkansas, are mean.
It allowed Democrats to say millions would lose health insurance because of the removal of premium subsidies based on income levels and the elimination of federal matching funds for Medicaid expansion plans such as the popular Arkansas Works, which covers the quarter-million or so whom the Hutchinson administration hasn't thrown off for substandard computer skills.
Another complication would be that state budgets would be left with a big gap. I'd ask Asa Hutchinson about that, but he's in a tough spot, being owned by Trump, but, though he is loath to admit it, far more competent and fair-minded than Trump.
All of that is to say that the Democrats, at a nadir in terms of morale, got handed an issue that many of them think was as responsible for the midterm advances in November as general disdain for the style and character of Trump.
This is a big issue, and not only for the compelling matter of pre-existing conditions, which, by the way, is exemplified by a young woman formerly living in Arkansas whom I follow on social media.
With her Stage IV cancer in remission, she has chosen to live in Colorado because, as she looked around state to state, she found that Colorado was among the five or six with a law on the books covering pre-existing conditions absolutely, no matter the rug the federal government might pull out from under everyone else.
You might remember my column a couple of weeks ago about the tragically late Matt DeCample, the cancer victim who was formerly Mike Beebe's press secretary.
DeCample explained at a news conference last fall in Democratic congressional candidate Clarke Tucker's behalf that removal of the federal mandate for equitable coverage for pre-existing conditions would leave him to a "crap shoot." It would compound his worries about cancer itself--about maybe dying--with financial concern for what treatments he could afford and how he might ration them.
If the Democrats can't win a debate on that--and on the loss of subsidized health insurance for millions, which would drain the pool and raise premiums for everyone else--then they don't deserve to win.
And if the voters re-elect a president who would do that to people for the purpose of throwing meat inside the cage of his rabid base, then those voters deserve--but the rest of us don't--the president we get.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 03/28/2019