"Well, we are all going to die"

Sen. Joni Ernst defaults to tired lines about fraud, abuse and the undocumented to defend indefensible cuts to Medicaid and more

If there was any lingering hope that Sen. Joni Ernst might put basic humanity before blind allegiance to Donald Trump, she didn’t just stomp on it Friday. She made mockery of the idea it should matter.

Ernst was asked by a constituent at her Butler County town hall meeting about the risk that Trump’s proposed Medicaid cuts will cause people to die. This is the budget bill the House recently passed, which would cut $698 billion from the federal health care program that covers the low income. The budget bill now awaits a vote in the U.S. Senate, where Ernst represents Iowa.

But instead of insist she wouldn’t support a law that could cost lives, the Republican senator from Red Oak responded with the callous quip, “Well, we all are going to die.” Almost as tone deaf as that irrelevant retort was her apparent cluelessness on why it offended people. “For heaven’s sakes, folks,” Ernst retorted when the crowd jeered. She later complained to reporters about encountering "hysteria… coming from the left."

Call it what she will, but so much for fealty to those humble roots Ernst boasted of in her first Senate campaign. Then, she spoke of wearing bread bags around her shoes as a child to keep them dry. Now, if the second-term Republican senator spends any time out among ordinary people where they live, it’s hard to imagine how she could have given such an indifferent response.

Medicaid is, as a questioner pointed out, the main source of revenue for Iowa’s rural hospitals and community health centers. This budget bill also cuts $267 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program which provides food stamps to low-income families. In Iowa, as I reported last week, 42 % of SNAP recipients live in rural areas.

But Ernst’s narrative now, apparently informed and crafted around Trump’s agenda, is to point the finger at supposedly undeserving people trying to game the system by improperly seeking public assistance for their families. That’s offensive under any circumstances. But it’s shameless when programs like Medicaid would be slashed to dole out trillions in tax cuts to the uber rich, raising the federal deficit by $3.8 trillion.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates the budget plan would deprive 10 million people of their health coverage while giving $4 trillion in tax cuts to the wealthiest. Medicaid covers 41 % of U.S. childbirths and 39 % of children’s healthcare.

But Ernst preferred to frame the Medicaid cuts as a campaign against “waste, fraud and abuse.” And there, she tried to lay blame on undocumented immigrants. She told a reporter Friday, “We don't need to see illegal immigrants receiving benefits that should be going to Iowans." She might as well have said, “Let them die.”

Yet as the Senator well knows, undocumented immigrants aren’t eligible for federal Medicaid benefits, and she offered no evidence that they’re getting them. Even long-term immigrants with visas have to have been in the country for years to qualify for that government assistance.

But blaming the so-called undeserving, or the undocumented, has become an almost ritualistic go-to for Ernst, as it is for Trump, whose budget bill ramps up immigration enforcement by $150 billion over five years. Meanwhile, neither public official shows real interest in passing comprehensive immigration reform.

And the narrative trickles down to Republican-led states, including Iowa, where it’s a tough case to make that undocumented immigrants are harming the economy. To the contrary, Iowa’s agricultural industry depends on their labor to do its sometimes dangerous grunt work. And small Iowa towns depend on immigrants’ presence to thrive.

So it’s also with utmost hypocrisy that Iowa’s Gov. Kim Reynolds sends Iowa National Guard troops to the southern U.S. border in the name of fighting illegal drugs. She also signed an agreement with Iowa's top law enforcement officials to fully cooperate with Trump’s deportation agenda, which could include assisting with mass deportation raids and honoring federal detainer requests. Reynolds did so in the name of promoting Iowans’ “public safety.” She included references to “dangerous criminals, gang members and terrorists," though her order doesn’t require that deportees fit that criteria.

At least Reynolds isn’t running for re-election. But Ernst will face voters again next year. And if there were ever any doubt about where her priorities lie, it became painfully clear this week who they’re not with: People of limited means who could die preventable deaths because their health care was slashed.

Because after all, as she observed, “We are all going to die.”

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