It's on: The fight over Medicaid

If there was any one subject about which Donald Trump has been pellucidly clear, it has been this: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are to remain sacrosanct. Indeed, I would argue this has been central to his takeover of the Republican Party -- he adopted not just elements of the New Deal but elements of the Great Society too, jettisoning the political baggage of having to oppose them.

When he did debate other Republicans in the spring of 2016 he was consistently 'to their left' on such matters.

And (a distinct but related point) when he was President the first time, he consistently told us that in another two weeks or so we would see a great new plan for health care coverage that would make Obamacare obsolete. Talk like a populist though you walk like a plutocrat.

The Republicans in the House of Representatives, it appears, did not get any of those memos.

One and only one Republican voted against the budget resolution, which uses Medicaid as the piggy bank that has to be raided to justify Trump's tax cuts.

This is going to be BIG. More than any of the Sound and Fury of the early weeks of his second term. Bigger even than the domestic fall-out from our national change-of-sides on Ukraine. The talk-like-a-populist-walk-like-a-plutocrat thing has come to a head on this point. Medicaid. Lots of the Republicans' base now directly benefits from Medicaid.

The House members who did vote for the resolution are laying a semantic game, "I didn't really vote to cut Medicaid. That was only an authorization for further discussion," or the like. Actually it was a road map to a budget. And the only way to continue following anything like that road map is ... to cut Medicaid.

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