State Republicans Are Now Bullying Indiana University Much Like Trump Is Attacking Harvard

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to This Post)

Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done and where it’s easy to see without looking too far that not much is really sacred.

We begin in Mississippi, where they’re all gathering to welcome a native son home after his stint in MAGAworld. From Mississippi Today:

Former Mississippi Medicaid Director Drew Snyder is stepping down as head of the federal Medicaid agency. Snyder, an attorney, was tapped by the Trump administration in January to serve as the deputy administrator and director of the Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services. Snyder is resigning due to personal family matters, a source familiar with the situation told Mississippi Today on Tuesday. ... “Drew has played an invaluable role leading our Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services as we began strengthening the programs to better serve the nation’s most vulnerable,” CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz said in a statement. “Caprice [Knapp, interim acting director] is an incredibly talented leader and will help lead the Center through this transition, ensuring we continue building upon Drew’s efforts.”

(I’d almost forgotten that the president had handed over Medicaid and Medicare to that quack. Oblivion is not just a river in Egypt.)

Mississippi is one of the few states that refused to accept the FREE MONEY! available to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. And its government was certainly one of the proudest of not having done so. Endless wrangling in the legislature came to nothing, despite the needs of the state’s poor and its rural health-care establishment. From Mississippi Public Broadcasting:

Mississippi came close to adopting Medicaid expansion last year, which would have extended coverage to around 200,000 low-income residents, but the effort was kneecapped in the final moments of the 2024 legislative session over disagreements around work requirements. But despite a desire from most legislators to get a bill across the finish line during this session, lawmakers have been hesitant to commit, tabling conversations around a new bill and citing concerns over costs, implementation challenges and uncertainty of the future political landscape under President Donald Trump.

“It’s not going to solve all problems, but it will give people the opportunity to have insurance coverage,” Mitchell Adcock, executive director of the Center for Mississippi Health Policy, a group that supports expansion, said. “So if they need medical services, they can get access to those services.” Currently, an estimated 74,000 Mississippians fall into the “coverage gap”—earning too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to afford marketplace insurance. There is no coverage gap in states that have expanded Medicaid. Instead, a single person making up to 138% of the poverty level—around $20,000 a year—can enroll in Medicaid. People making more than that can access subsidies for private health insurance.

The real roadblock was/is Governor Tate Reeves, who, last January, seemed to be inordinately proud of this ability to spurn FREE MONEY! From Mississippi Today:

Reeves, again, called on lawmakers to oppose efforts to expand Medicaid coverage to the working poor, a policy he derisively calls “welfare,” because President Donald Trump’s administration could make sweeping changes to Medicaid policy in the coming months. “Medicaid changes, for example, are coming,” Reeves said. “What they will be, we do not yet know. But there is a large possibility that those changes will result in a greater spend by states who have enacted this type of welfare expansion.”

And right by Reeves’s side as he resisted the onslaught of good health for everyone was state Medicaid director ... Drew Snyder, a man with a deft hand for fudge. Again, from MT:

The study by the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning University Research Center surmises that Medicaid expansion would produce an average of 11,000 jobs per year between 2022 and 2027 and provide an additional $44 million per year for the state general fund. The positive results, the study concludes, are the result of several factors, including the economic boost from the infusion of the federal money into the state, the savings from moving certain groups from the traditional Medicaid program to the expansion program and from other incentives provided by the federal government to expand Medicaid.

Snyder questioned the validity of the study. “We recognize these are big decisions,” Snyder recently told legislative leaders of the possibility of expanding Medicaid. “…This is not a free or add-on to the state. It will cost money. The question now comes is this the money we want to spend.” After making his comments, Snyder conceded he is not an economist.

Which made him a perfect hire for this job in the Trump administration. Now, having done his share to help make the entire country Mississippi, he’s going home to watch the shitstorm descend. If he does have personal issues, I hope he can resolve them, but millions of people are about to have them too, and his work on that is almost done.

Off to Indiana, where the state’s universities are running up the, ah, white flag. From The New York Times:

Republicans passed a new law that would require university boards to measure the productivity of tenured faculty. Faculty were downgraded to “advisory only” roles in university decision-making. Degree programs that graduated too few students would be closed. And at Indiana University, whose flagship campus in Bloomington is ranked among the nation’s top 100 schools, the state’s governor was given new power over the school’s governing board. The moves align with a conservative playbook to reduce faculty power on campuses perceived by many on the right as bastions of liberal thought. This year, several other Republican-led states passed laws requiring reviews for tenured faculty and the reorganization of programs at public institutions that have low enrollment.

Many faculty members see the Indiana bill as an attack on their university’s independence and part of an effort to restrict their own freedom to teach and speak. They read [IU president] Dr. Whitten’s silence as support for the changes. “In comparison to Harvard, the damage is very similar,” said Heather Akou, an associate professor of fashion design at Indiana University Bloomington and the incoming president-elect of the Bloomington Faculty Council. “It’s just that it’s not as public and it’s being handled mostly within the state instead of by the federal government.”

The results, I guarantee you, will be the same. They’ll be back for another pound eventually.

And for this week’s entry in the Nothing to Add to This Story file, we must go to the state legislature of Idaho. From Lowering the Bar:

House Bill 270, which the governor has since signed into law, amended and expanded the state’s “indecent exposure” statute. Previously, it criminalized only the exposure of what I will refer to as one’s “business” in any public place “or in any place where there is present another person or persons who are offended thereby….” Idaho Code § 18-4116. But the bill expands this to punish one who similarly displays “toys or products intended to resemble” male or female business, or exposes “developed female breasts,” real or artificial. The concern about “toys or products intended to resemble” human business is what seems to have gotten the bill dubbed “the truck nuts bill,” following mockery to that effect by Melissa Wintrow, Idaho’s Senate Minority Leader.

Truck nuts are a traffic hazard, especially in the upper latitudes. In the frigid winter snows, they have been known to leap spontaneously into the trunk of a car or the back of a pickup, distracting other drivers and causing accidents that motorists find embarrassing to explain to their families or their insurance agents.

And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence Blog Official Cavaleiro-vilão Friedman of the Algarve brings us another tale of the intersection of our screwed up health-care system and our really screwed up political system. From Public Radio Tulsa:

A bipartisan group of 28 female lawmakers sent Gov. Kevin Stitt a letter expressing their “profound disappointment” that he vetoed a measure aimed at expanding access to mammograms. The women wrote Saturday that Stitt’s veto of House Bill 1389 was “disheartening to patients, doctors, families and the very values we all hold dear in our great state,” but said that female lawmakers were celebrating the Legislature’s overwhelming decision to override Stitt’s veto. The House voted 83-3 to override the veto and the Senate voted 42-2. ... In his veto message, Stitt said he vetoed the bill because while he’s “sympathetic” to people battling breast cancer, the legislation would have imposed “new and costly” insurance mandates on private health plans and raised insurance premiums.

This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.