Commentary by Jerry Lanson
My wife grew up in a St. Louis suburb. When we were in our mid-20s, we lived in her parent’s home there for a summer before enrolling in masters’ degree programs at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
At my summer job, bell hopping at the St. Louis Holiday Inn downtown, I learned the art of hustling tips and got ticketed for driving too fast shuttling baseball fans to Busch Stadium. The old guys I worked for, George and Jim, regaled me with tales of their years working as porters on the railways and selling bootleg liquor during Prohibition to the sheriff of Denver. Having witnessed their techniques for hustling tips, I never doubted them.
In Columbia, studying journalism, I got assigned to cover a hotly contested campaign over whether to institute countrywide planning and zoning. My reporting took me to nearby farms, where I learned to take my time, listen, and talk about the weather and crops before asking any questions. I figured I was getting a handle on the culture when two farmers offered me work in the fields.
Although I don’t believe the term “Purple State” was used in politics in the mid-1970s, Missouri surely was one. Stuart Symington served as a Democratic Senator from 1953 to 1976. And as late as 2018, Missouri had one Democratic Senator. But today the state is solidly red. Republicans have controlled both houses of the state legislature since 2003. In 2024, Donald Trump took 58.5 percent of the vote.
Nonetheless, as the massive House bill heads to the Senate that would make tax cuts for the rich permanent and carve deeply into Medicaid and food stamps, one of the most outspoken opponents of the Medicaid cuts has been Missouri’s populist Republican Sen. Josh Hawley. Writing in The New York Times a couple of weeks ago, he noted Medicaid provides health insurance to 1 million people in his state alone.
“If Congress cuts funding for Medicaid benefits, Missouri workers and their children will lose their health care,” he wrote. “And hospitals will close. It’s that simple. And that pattern will be replicated in states across the country.”
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill, if it becomes law, will end the health care of 10.3 million lower-income Americans in the next decade. Other estimates are higher.
The question now is whether the conservative senator from the Show Me State will have the gumption to stick to his guns and bring other Republican senators with him.
Donald Trump has proven adept at strong-arming Republicans in Congress many times before, threatening to back an opponent against anyone who gets out of line. But Hawley was just re-elected in 2024 and may have presidential ambitions of his own.
I decided to visit some of Missouri’s newspaper sites to see what they’re saying about the Republican mega-bill. Google lists 46 newspapers in the state, from the Boonville Daily News, covering Cooper and Howard counties in central Missouri since 1919, to the Washington Missourian, founded in 1860 in Franklin County. The Daily News last Saturday featured a photo gallery of the graduating class, a celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Pleasant Green United Methodist Church and an announcement of writing scholarship award recipients. The Washington Missourian web site featured breaking news of a crash, council approval of a street grade variance and a photo gallery of recent graduates. Neither had anything to say in news or columns about the House mega-tax bill nor the Medicaid and food stamp cuts it will trigger.
Urban papers in the state, however, did. The lead editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, founded in 1878 by Joseph Pulitzer, offered the headline, “The GOP’s latest reverse-Robin Hood tax scheme will test its populist rhetoric.” The Kansas City Star, published since 1880, asked, “Can Josh Hawley out Trump Trump with the working person?” It began like this: “If you offered me half of Elon Musk’s holdings to tell you what Josh Hawley truly believes, I would not be able to cash the check.”
A second commentary ran under the headline, “Missouri, Kansas GOP claim Trump tax plan saves money. How?”
Even in Red States, the largest cities tend to lean Democratic. So, I looked at the papers in two smaller cities, Jefferson City, the state capitol, and Springfield in the Ozarks.
The Jefferson City News Tribune, founded in 1865, didn’t write about Medicaid but did offer a grim assessment of federal food assistance would be as a result of the House bill.
“Missouri could lose around $400 million in federal funding for food assistance under a plan approved by Congressional Republicans on Thursday – which would strain the state budget and likely strip thousands of low-income families of food aid across the state. The cost shifts could put pressure on the legislature to slash the state’s SNAP program or fill in federal funding gaps by cutting other state services.”
And though residents of Springfield cast 60% of their ballots for Donald Trump last November, the Springfield News-Leader ran the same story. The paper, founded in 1867, also published a guest op-ed calling on the Trump Administration to restore a planned $1.2 billion cut to the National Park Service nationwide.
Hawley and any other GOP Senators who say they want to preserve Medicaid will face a dilemma. Even with these cuts, the bill already balloons the deficit by trillions. Will they dare stand up for constituents who are not mega-donors in the face of pressure to make the rich richer?
Writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait noted that the legislation “might, if enacted, carry out the largest upward transfer of wealth in American history. “
And if that happens, that transfer will be built on the backs of basic health care stripped from Hawley’s Missouri constituents and those of Republican senators elsewhere.
This column originally appeared in Lanson’s From the Grassroots Substack. Reposted by permission of the author.
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Budget Bill, Tariffs and Crypto Dinners
Headline from The Onion on last week’s 214-213 House vote on the president’s Big, Beautiful (budget) bill: “Republican Infighting Erupts Over Whether Trump Bill Beautiful or Handsome.”
The Senate still has its say on the Big Beautiful Bill Act, and markups begin next Monday, June 2, with hopes a reconciliation package will land on President Trump’s Resolute Desk before Congress’ August break (though there’s still all of September before the next fiscal year).
Pundits expect a major rewrite of the bill in the Senate, where only a majority is needed for passage.
This gives us lots of time to fill the right and left columns with your comments on the bill. And on Trump’s tariff roller-coaster. And on the mix of the Trump presidency with the Trump Organization’s business dealings.
Email your COMMENTS on any or all of these issues to editors@thehustings.news and please indicate your political leanings – left or right whether centrist, progressive or pro-MAGA – in the subject line.