It’s difficult to pick the single most outrageous part of the Republican Party’s domestic policy megabill — the inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill — but the GOP’s sweeping Medicaid cuts are certainly among the most controversial. In broad strokes, the party decided to try to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy by slashing a health care program that benefits low-income families and Americans with disabilities.
As NBC News reported, one of the senators who helped pass the far-right package now wants to undo at least some of the Medicaid cuts before they take effect:
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., introduced a bill to reverse some of the key Medicaid provisions in the party’s megabill that he voted for and Trump signed into law earlier this month. Hawley wants to double the fund to rural hospitals, from $50 billion to $100 billion, and ‘repeal the provider tax moratorium and the future reduction of provider tax authority in the reconciliation bill,’ according to the text of his proposed legislation.
“Now is the time to prevent any future cuts to Medicaid from going into effect,” the senator added.
The Missouri Republican went on to tell NBC News that if his fellow Republicans don’t oppose their own Medicaid cuts, they’ll risk a voter backlash — which is true, though difficult to wrap one’s head around given that Hawley was referring to a policy he and his GOP brethren voted for just two weeks ago.
Indeed, consider a brief timeline of recent events.
June 28: Hawley criticizes his party’s Medicaid cuts, declaring, “I think, frankly, my party needs to do some soul-searching. If you want to be a working-class party, you’ve got to deliver for working-class people. You cannot take away health care from working people. And unless this is changed going forward, that is what will happen in coming years.”
July 1: Hawley votes for the megabill that includes hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid cuts, which he’d denounced three days earlier.
July 9: Hawley publicly condemns the Medicaid cuts in the legislation he supported the previous week.
July 15: Hawley introduces legislation to pare back some of the Medicaid cuts he helped pass two weeks earlier.
There are plenty of examples of GOP lawmakers who expressed disapproval of the package before (and after) voting for it, but Missouri’s senior senator is blazing a different kind of trail: He’s not saying, “I just voted for a bad bill”; he’s instead effectively declaring, “We should fix the bad bill I just voted for.” As recently as May, Hawley wrote an op-ed for The New York Times in which the senator wrote, among other things, “We must ignore calls to cut Medicaid.” The senator added that “slashing health insurance for the working poor” would be “both morally wrong and politically suicidal.” It seemed bold and declarative, right up until Hawley scurried in the opposite direction — just like he did on Jan. 6, 2021. Last fall, the editorial board of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch told readers that the Missouri Republican has “an unparalleled record of demagoguery on the Senate floor, where he endlessly spews faux-populist sound and fury signifying nothing.” The editors concluded, “[B]eyond any partisan considerations, Josh Hawley is quite possibly the worst sitting senator in America right now.” The assessment lingers for a reason.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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