Wisconsin Democrats urged Republicans this week to pass a bill in special session expanding Medicaid. Republicans took no action on the bill.
Photo:
Scott Bauer/Associated Press
DEMOCRATS LOOK TO MEDICAID EXPANSION fights to juice 2022 races in battleground states like Wisconsin and Florida, and even red ones like Missouri. They have been boosted by several state ballot referendums showing popular support for the expansions, and a carrot-and-stick approach from the Biden administration aided by American Rescue Plan funds. Resistant Republicans are tying the expansions to other Democratic policies, like expanded unemployment benefits, that they say are hampering the economic recovery from the pandemic.
Wisconsin Democratic
Gov. Tony Evers
this week called the GOP-controlled state legislature into session to consider accepting around $1 billion in federal funds to expand Medicaid eligibility to roughly 91,000 more people. The GOP-led legislative chambers gaveled out within seconds. Statehouse Speaker
Robin Vos
said the expansion would “trap people in the life of poverty.” Evers and his allies plan to make the Republican rejection of Medicaid money a campaign issue for 2022, when Evers is up for reelection, and they wasted no time doing so after the session. “Republican legislators should have to explain to Wisconsinites across our state why they made the decision they did today,” Evers said.
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In Florida, organizers are collecting signatures for a Medicaid ballot initiative that could juice turnout for other races, including governor and U.S. senator. Missouri Democrats hope for a boost in the uphill race to replace
Sen. Roy Blunt
after Republican legislators declined to provide funds for Medicaid expansion despite voters approving a 2020 constitutional amendment requiring the state to expand coverage. In Georgia, advocacy groups are running ads pressuring Gov. Brian Kemp, who says he has already boosted access to healthcare (but not taken federal funding). He is also up for re-election in 2022.
Support for Medicaid expansions doesn’t necessarily correlate to support for Democrats, however: In 2018, Nebraska voters expanded Medicaid with 53% in favor, the same day Republican
Gov. Pete Ricketts
won 59% in his re-election bid.
THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT should take decisive action to deal with possible antitrust law violations in the meatpacking industry, a bipartisan group of senators and House members said. In a Thursday letter led by South Dakota Republican
Sen. Mike Rounds
and Minnesota Democratic Sen. Tina Smith, the legislators said the Justice Department needed to produce results from its continuing review of a handful of companies in the beef-processing market. They cite the confluence of rising consumer prices, plummeting cattle prices, and large profits for the companies that “defy expectations of market fundamentals.” A spokesperson for the North American Meat Institute, a major industry group, said the group’s members “and their livestock suppliers benefit from a fair and competitive market.”
The letter doesn’t name particular companies, though it notes that four firms control 80% of the beef-processing market. The industry has already mobilized for an antitrust fight that the government has gradually ramped up. Beef and pork giant JBS USA Holdings Inc. hired a former Federal Trade Commission general counsel as its new chief legal officer last month. Last June, the Justice Department subpoenaed the four largest meat companies as part of an antitrust probe. That’s in addition to a price-fixing probe of the chicken industry.
EGYPTIAN PRESIDENT
Abdel Fattah Al Sisi
got critical face time with top U.S. officials this week, giving him a chance to press for a favorable resolution to the crisis over an Ethiopian dam project on the Nile River. Sisi’s role in brokering a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas earned him his first call with President Biden on Monday after months of silence, along with a Wednesday visit from Secretary of State
Antony Blinken.
The talks focused on Israeli-Palestinian issues but allowed the Egyptians to express concerns about how the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam will affect their water supply.
Biden told Sisi that the U.S. has an interest in achieving a diplomatic resolution over the $4.8 billion dam, which Egypt regards as a strategic threat. The issue will come to a head this summer, as the Ethiopian government has moved ahead with plans to fill the reservoir of the dam for a second time in July, and start using it to generate power in August. The meetings come amid worsening U.S.-Ethiopian relations over human-rights abuses in Ethiopia’s Tigray region, which led Blinken to impose new visa restrictions on Ethiopian officials on Sunday.
FACEBOOK tinkers with its controls to go after pages that repeatedly share false information. When users try to follow a page that has been flagged multiple times by fact-checkers, they will get an alert so they can make an informed decision about whether to follow the page. The social-media platform will also penalize individuals who share false information repeatedly by limiting the reach of all of their posts.
MINOR MEMOS: Comedian Jon Stewart welcomes visitors to Washington’s “dead cicada festival,” when “the majestic cicada on the ground is squished by many Brooks Brothers loafers”…Chief Justice
John Roberts
trashes Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in law school graduation speech: “Keep in mind that Holmes is a better source for quotes than he is for the law”…Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse casts mid-workout amendment votes in a Reagan/Bush ‘84 T-shirt, shorts and headphones.
Write to Gabriel T. Rubin at gabriel.rubin@wsj.com
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Appeared in the May 29, 2021, print edition as ‘.’