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Deeply conservative Oklahoma narrowly approved a ballot initiative Tuesday to expand Medicaid to nearly 200,000 low-income adults, the first state to do so in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

The vote to expand the Affordable Care Acts reach once again put voters, many of them conservative, at odds with Republican leaders, who have worked to block it or invalidate it. Five states Maine, Utah, Idaho, Nebraska, and now Oklahoma have used ballot initiatives to expand Medicaid after their Republican governors refused to do so.

Oklahoma pushed the G.O.P. over a notable threshold: Most congressional Republicans now represent Medicaid-expansion states. The vote also came at a striking moment, less than a week after the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn the entirety of Obamacare including Medicaid expansion.

What we saw last night was Medicaid expansion triumph over party and ideology, said Jonathan Schleifer, executive director of the Fairness Project, which has helped organize all the Medicaid votes. Oklahoma voted for Medicaid expansion even as Trump is doubling down on repeal.

Medicaid expansion could spread further into Republican-controlled states this year, as they weigh how to cover the many unemployed Americans expected to lose health insurance along with their jobs. Missouri voters will decide on a ballot initiative at the states August primary. If it passes, it will expand Obamacare coverage to 217,000 low-income people.

Some Wyoming legislators recently took a fresh look at the program, too, as they watched job losses mount. Ive voted against it about 10 times, never voted for it, said the states House speaker, Steve Harshman, a Republican. Now Im thinking of our work force. Were a mineral and oil kind of state. Thats a lot of able-bodied adults in a lot of industries who will probably need some coverage.

Mr. Harshman voted in May to have a legislative committee study the topic, but he does not expect any action until the bodys next session begins in January.

Medicaid expansion has proved an especially resilient part of the health care law, despite early challenges. The program, which provides coverage to Americans earning less than 133 percent of the federal poverty line (about $16,970 for an individual), was initially meant to serve all 50 states.

But in a 2012 ruling, the Supreme Court declared that states could decline to participate. The program began in 2014 with about half of the states, mostly run by Democratic governors.

That figure has grown to 37 states and the District of Columbia, as more Republican-controlled states have signed on. Many academic studies have found that the program increases enrollees access to medical care. A more limited body of research shows that the program also reduces mortality rates.

The program still faces threats, most significantly the Trump administration lawsuit to overturn the health law. The Department of Justice, alongside a coalition of 20 Republican-controlled states, submitted briefs to the Supreme Court last week arguing that the recent repeal of the individual mandate, which required all Americans to carry health coverage or pay a fine, made the entire law unconstitutional.

President Trump has found strong support in Oklahoma; he took 65 percent of the vote there in 2016 in a 36-point victory, and recently held a campaign rally in Tulsa, his first since the start of the pandemic.

Still, voters there broke with him on this issue, albeit by the margin of one percentage point. The ballot initiative drew 30,000 more voters than the states Senate primaries, suggesting that some Oklahomans came out specifically to support the insurance expansion.

Oklahoma is an awfully red state, said Adam Searing, an associate professor at Georgetown University who has tracked the states ballot effort. Its very conservative, very rural. To have it pass there is quite significant.

Oklahomas Republican leadership had opposed Medicaid expansion and initially offered more limited alternatives. Gov. Kevin Stitt outlined a program in January in which new low-income enrollees would pay modest premiums and be required to work to gain coverage.

He went on to veto that program, after the legislature secured its funding.

Oklahoma was also the first state to ask the Trump administration for permission to convert its Medicaid program to block grant funding, an idea strongly pushed by Mr. Trumps health appointees. The state would receive a lump-sum payment from the federal government to run the program with additional flexibility. Opponents of that proposal worry that such a funding formula could struggle to keep up with increased enrollment in an economic downturn.

Oklahoma submitted its application in April, and the Trump administration had not issued a decision before the Tuesday vote.

Oklahomas ballot initiative is notable in being the first to add the Medicaid expansion to the states Constitution. That will make it hard for Governor Stitt and the Republican-controlled legislature to tinker with or block the program, as other governors have sought to do in the wake of successful ballot initiatives. Most notably, when Paul LePage was governor of Maine, he declared he would go to jail before implementing the states Medicaid ballot initiative. The situation was resolved when a Democratic governor was elected and set up the coverage expansion.

In Oklahoma, ballot organizers can pursue either statutory or constitutional initiatives. The latter have more staying power but also require gathering twice as many signatures. Amber England, who led the ballot effort, felt the additional work was worth it.

If were going to ask people to get clipboards and pens, and gather signatures, we want to make the policy as strong as possible, she said. It was important that we protect Oklahomans access to health with the Constitution. We didnt want politicians to be able to take that right away.

Missouri will be the next state to vote on Medicaid expansion, in its Aug. 4 primary. The state is a party to the Trump administrations case against Obamacare. Gov. Michael Parson, a Republican, has publicly opposed that ballot initiative, which he argues is too costly in the midst of an economic downturn. Missouri would need to cover 10 percent of new Medicaid enrollees bills, with the federal government paying the other 90 percent.

I dont think its the time to be expanding anything in the state of Missouri right now, Mr. Parson told a local television station in early May. Theres absolutely not going to be any extra money whatsoever.

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Republican Leaders Want to End Obamacare. Their Voters Are Expanding It. - The New York Times

After every single Republican on the coronavirus subcommittee turned up to a Friday meeting without wearing a mask, the Democratic chair has threatened to stop them from speaking at future meetings if they fail to do so again.

Not wearing a mask in a confined space such as a committee hearing room violates rules written by Congresss attending physician, if attendees intend to be in the space for more than 15 minutes.

Representative Jim Clyburn who chairs the coronavirus subcommittee meetings released a letter on Monday morning, expressing his profound disappointment at this rule being flouted at a time when the United States reached the highest number of new coronavirus cases on record, and after the disease has already killed more people in the United States than in any other nation on Earth.

Clyburn said he reminded attendees in person of that requirement and that posters outside the committee room also flagged the issue. The refusal to wear face coverings has raged across America. The president himself refuses to wear a mask. Meanwhile, a small number of Americans have objected to official guidance on wearing face coverings in enclosed spaces, arguing that it impinges on their constitutional freedoms. According to the Poynter institute, there is no constitutional right that allows people not to wear a mask.

My Republican colleagues refusal to wear masks is perplexing because you have asked repeatedly to hold in-person hearings, and you assured me that this could be done safely, Clyburn wrote in a letter addressed to Steve Scalise, the ranking Republican on the committee. Unfortunately, the Republican Members refusal to wear masks undermined the safety of everyone in the hearing room, he said.

Clyburn, in his role as chair of the committee, has to formally acknowledge a member before they can speak or participate in the meeting.

In his letter, he has threatened not to recognize any members of the committee who try to speak without wearing a mask in the meeting.

Scalise said in the meeting on Friday that he saw mask-wearing as an additional precaution, rather than a necessary requirement.

There are guidelines out there for how to properly social distance and were following those. And again, I understand doctors might look at things differently and want to give even extra precautions, but the precautions that have been out there are clearly being followed, he said.

He added that representatives have complied with social distancing rules and did not want to hurt anybody.

None of us would want to put anybody else in harms way. Its why the House has been having votes on the House floor safely, properly, with social distancing, with the necessary supplies to make sure we can wipe down spaces, Scalise said.

Clyburn said that members who do not want to wear masks to meetings could also participate virtually in future meetings, in which case, he would be willing to let them speak.

Read more:
Republicans told to wear masks in House panel or be barred from speaking - The Guardian

Top House Republicans, including Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, are backing a climate policy framework outlined by the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative youth climate group.

Its the first time in recent years that Republican lawmakers have lent their support for a comprehensive climate strategy. The ACC is hoping its American Climate Contract will allow GOP lawmakers, who before the pandemic had just begun to unveil a series of low-carbon policies, to contextualize those efforts and root them in climate-focused messaging.

Prior to this, the conversation continued to be so defined by the Green New Deal being the benchmark, and I think this is the next step, said Quill Robinson, the ACCs government affairs director.

The framework takes the discussions beyond whether, or not climate change exists or if people support the liberal Green New Deal, Robinson told the Washington Examiner. This is a climate plan that you have the most powerful Republicans in the House supporting, he added.

In total, 10 top GOP lawmakers are backing the groups American Climate Contract, the coalition announced Monday. In addition to McCarthy, its backers include Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, the top Republican on the House Energy Committee, and Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana, the top Republican on the House select climate panel.

The ACC will also announce support from Republican senators in the next few weeks, Robinson said.

As we look to rebuild our nation, I believe that we have an opportunity to do so while creating a cleaner future for all Americans, McCarthy said in a statement.

Conservative plans for the environment, as this contract does, understand that lasting and effective environmental progress depends on American innovation and exporting that technology around the world not on enforcing debilitating taxes or punitive mandates, the California congressman added.

The ACCs policy plan, released in April, calls for the United States to advance policies that move toward a goal of global net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. It lays out support for four policies: investing in energy innovation, modernizing infrastructure, supporting conservation measures that store carbon, and engaging globally to reduce emissions.

The group also outlines a number of Republican-backed and bipartisan bills that fit within those areas, including legislation to incentivize energy storage, boost advanced nuclear energy, and promote carbon capture technologies.

We have to act now if we want to unlock the solutions that will aggressively combat climate change, said Rep. Tom Reed, a New York Republican who is supporting the framework, in a statement. Through smart, technology-neutral tax incentives, we can unleash American ingenuity and encourage the kind of innovation at scale that will significantly reduce carbon emissions.

A stated 2050 climate target has been something Republicans have been hesitant to embrace thus far, and its something Robinson said GOP lawmakers had questions about.

Republicans are justifiably skeptical about that, about putting too much of the onus on the U.S., Robinson said. But he added the ACC has stressed with Republican lawmakers that the U.S., while it cant address climate change alone, must take a leading role.

And while Robinson doesnt see climate change being the top issue this election season, he said hes hoping GOP candidates will talk about the issue on the campaign trail. Already, several GOP candidates including Michigans Peter Meijer, South Carolinas Nancy Mace, and Floridas Maria Salazar have embraced the ACCs framework.

Anybody who has a remotely purple race, this is one of those issues thats important, and it will be a detriment to them to not have something good to say or something coherent and strong and articulate on climate change, Robinson said.

Thats what the American Climate Contract is, and thats why some of these really exciting candidates who are being seen in the party as the next generation are talking about it, he added.

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Top House Republicans rally behind conservative youth climate plan - Washington Examiner

A tribal tension had infused downtown, Kuhn observes. Among the tribes were the police, who were anything but New Yorks finest that day. Mostly, they stood aside while the hard hats ran amok; examples of their nonfeasance abound. Some of them even egged on the thuggery. When a group of hard hats moved menacingly toward a Wall Street plaza, a patrolman shouted: Give em hell, boys. Give em one for me! Yet the police were never held accountable for failing to stop the marauding, and few hard hats owned up to the extent of their violence.

Kuhn favors straightforward journalistic prose, with few grand flourishes. In setting scenes, he tends toward a staccato, some of it overdone: One speaker exuded Establishment. The jacket and tie. A WASP face with a Roman nose. The side-swept hair, straight and trim with delicate bangs, a tidy mustache, pinkish skin. Hardly every antiwar protester merits his go-to characterization of them as potty-mouthed hippies.

But over all, this is a compelling narrative about a horrific day. In their fury, the hard hats left more than 100 wounded, the typical victim being a 22-year-old white male collegian, though one in four was a woman; seven police officers were also hurt. Kuhn concludes that while the workers plainly came loaded for bear, their tantrum was essentially spontaneous and not, as some believed, part of a grand conspiracy.

That said, they were just what some conservative strategists were looking for. Patrick Buchanan, then a Nixon aide, said of blue-collar Americans in a memo to the boss, These, quite candidly, are our people now. He wasnt wrong. Republicans have since catered as ever to the rich but they have also curried favor with working-class whites, while Democrats seem more focused on others: racial minorities, gays, immigrants. Thanks in good measure to white blue-collar disaffection, Trump in 2016 narrowly won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, a hat trick he may yet pull off again in November.

In a way, Vietnam continues to cast its shadow. A short walk from those 1970 streets of chaos, there is a memorial to the 1,741 New Yorkers who died in the war. Its dominant feature is a wall of thick glass etched with reflections on combat, including part of a haunting letter sent home from Vietnam in 1968. One thing worries me will people believe me? The Navy lieutenant Richard W. Strandberg wrote. Will they want to hear about it, or will they want to forget the whole thing ever happened?

Indeed, most Americans forgot about Vietnam long ago. The same has been true about the shameful hard-hat riot of 1970. Until now.

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The Day the White Working Class Turned Republican - The New York Times

Sophia A. Nelson, Opinion contributor Published 6:00 a.m. ET June 20, 2020

Though the name endures, the current Republican Party is no longer Lincoln's party that advocated freedom, democracy, and justice for all

As President Donald Trump prepared to go to Tulsa for his Saturday rally, Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma proclaimed that no question this is still the Party of Lincoln.

Well, Senator Lankford, I have news for you: Todays GOP, led by Trump, is not the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln. In fact, it is not the party of Ulysses S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhoweror Ronald Reagan, either.

Instead, it is a party increasingly dominated by activists who are overwhelmingly white, always aggrieved, virulently militant about the Second Amendment (and their rightsnotto wear a face mask during a pandemic), pro-Confederacy and openly racist. That is your party, senator.

Lets be clear. This is not the party that began in 1854 as a pro-abolitionist, anti-slavery party. This is not the party that freed the slaves or passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. No, this is not the party whose leaderswon the Civil War, fought the Klan, and ushered in Reconstruction. This is not the party that welcomed Booker T. Washington to the White House or used federal troops in 1957 to integrate Little Rock High.

This is not the party, led by Everett Dirksen in the Senate, that helped pass the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s. Sadly, this Republican Party has within its elected ranks only one Black senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, and one Black member of the House, Will Hurd of Texas. Hurd announced he was retiring in 2020, and Scott has saidthat if he runs for re-election in 2022, it will be his final term.

No, this is not your great grandfathers or even your grandfather's Republican Party. This Republican Party will be the first-ever to openly and proudlystain Lincolns legacy and embrace instead the traitors of Southern rebellion that sought to divide and destroy the Union our Founding Fathersestablishedin 1776.

This is now Donald Trumps party. And his trip to Tulsa (a city that, in 1921, was the site of the worst mass murder of peaceful black men and women in the history of America)the day afterJuneteenth (which commemorates the end of U.S. slavery) says a lot.

Sophia A. Nelson(Photo: Family handout)

Trumps conduct during the aftermath of George Floyds tragic murder has been reprehensible, cowardly, and divisive. He has made it clear to us all but most of all to his very white, very monolithic base that he is not on the side of democracy, freedom, and justice for all but, instead, on the side of suppressing free speech, tear-gassing protesters, and engaging in old culture wars that no longer resonate with a 21st century America, where more than 40% of the population is of color."

Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were Eisenhower Republicans. I was a moderate black female Republican for more than 25 years. Inspired by Jack Kemp at a college speech in 1988,I went on to work as an intern for Sen. Pete Wilson, R-Calif., and then for President George H.W. Bushs re-election campaign in 1992. Beyond that, I worked for former Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, R-N.J.And then, in 1997,as the first Black female counsel to the Republican majority on the House Reform and Oversight Committee Counsel.

History of Henrietta Wood: The Backstory: The little known story about a former slave who sued her captor and won

But once Trump was nominated and elected in 2016, I, like many moderates and centrists, became a never Trumper. I was an early senior adviser to the Lincoln Project when it launched in January 2020. And I now find myself in June 2020 disillusioned with the Never Trump movement, as it is too white and too male.

Let me say it plainly. If todays Republicans think that marching in Black Lives Matter solidarity with Sen. Mitt Romney one day, then singing Trump's praises the next day, makes you woke, then they are clueless as to the power and impact of this national moment. If todays Republicans think President Trump can throw the black community false sound-bites like I have done more for black people than any presidentwhile turningNational Guardsmen and police against peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square, then they are very wrong.

The 19th-centuryparty of Lincoln was one that stood for the unity of the union. Freedom for the enslaved. Opportunity for the oppressed. The 21st-centuryparty of Donald Trump stands for racial slurs, placing Hispanic babies in cages, telling duly-elected congresswomen of color to go back to where they came from, and hiding in a bunker during historic protests in support of racial equality and justice. It's no wonder that Mary Elizabeth Taylor, a senior State Department official and one of the administration's high-ranking African Americans, followed "the dictates of my conscience" and resigned on Thursday.

JUSTICE Act: GOP Sen. Tim Scott: I've choked on fear when stopped by police. We need the JUSTICE Act.

Make no mistake, what Trump is about to do in Tulsa is dangerous. Even if he gives lip service to racial justice and police reform, he is signaling from the pulpit of the presidency that he will preserve, protect, and defend the whiteness of America. When Republicans like Lankford harken back to Lincolns freeing of the slaves to prove they are not racist, that will not cut it in this pivotal moment for America on race relations.

Richard Nixon, with his southern strategy in 1968, accelerated the process of destroying the GOPs legacy as the party of Lincoln. Donald Trump has finished the job.

Sophia A. Nelson is a CNN commentator, journalist, and author of E Pluribus One: Reclaiming Our Founders' Vision for a United America. Follow her on Twitter:@IAmSophiaNelson

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Trump, Tulsa and the demise of Lincolns Republican Party - USA TODAY