And then Jesus drug tested everyone using taxpayer money before deciding if the lazy, freeloading masses were worthy enough to receive fish and bread.

“I can’t feed these people,” said GOP Jesus, an internet meme. “It will destroy their incentive to better themselves.”

Once their urine tested clean, Jesus reminded them that this was temporary assistance and warned against becoming dependent on his handouts. He went on to explain that tax revenues were actually for corporate subsidies and funding war. — Reddit meme, 2021

Tennessee Capitol Building as viewed from Bicentennial Capitol Mall State Park in Downtown Nashville (Photo: Brandon Hooper)

Tennessee Republicans believe that “giveaway money” (more commonly called unemployment benefits) is funding a “lifestyle alternative,” keeping many “from pulling up their bootstraps and achieving the American dream,” and that 300,000 Tennesseans should not have healthcare.

This year, GOP lawmakers cut the time for state unemployment benefits in half. They cut the time Tennesseans could get unemployment benefits from the federal government by two months. They also said no (again) to $1.4 billion that would have expanded TennCare, Tennessee’s Medicaid program.

As for the free money from the federal government, Elena Delavega, the poverty expert from the University of Memphis, said she’s wondered why lawmakers would not take it, and she then came to a disturbing conclusion.

“Sometimes — and I don’t want to think so — it seems like the purpose is to, in fact, hurt people,” said Delavega.

Cutting unemployment benefits and failing again to expand TennCare were two major moves that affected poor people across Tennessee, one of the 10 poorest states in the country. Insiders would add to that list other moves affecting mass incarceration, hikes on loan fees, education spending, “right to work” labor status, PAC donation limits, and more.

To outsiders, it may seem like the GOP supermajority that has run Nashville for the last 10 years has professionally crafted an anti-poor, pro-business playbook, locked arms, and expertly executed dozens of moves to lock the state deeply in conservative economic theory.

But it looks more coordinated than it is, according to one insider who said Republicans in the Capitol were just not that put together. The source organized the state GOP in three groups: a majority who treat the job like a “social hour or retirement home” and go along with whatever their majority leaders command, another group comprised of “true believers” — some of whom believe their “own bullshit,” and a final group that carries out the bidding of corporate special interests, chambers of commerce, and the institutional donor class.

“Business essentially runs the Capitol up here with the exception of the crazies in the gun lobby and the anti-LGBTQ community,” the source said.

It’s no secret that Republicans hate government handouts. Remember Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens”? Well, maybe they just hate some handouts, it seems. They crow about taking $1 billion in CARES Act funding to shield business owners from unemployment insurance hikes, and they use millions of dollars in federal handouts for an ongoing series of multi-million-dollar, no-bid contracts related to COVID-19. Tennessee Lookout editor Holly McCall found that more than a dozen Tennessee GOP lawmakers took federal handouts to bail out their businesses during the pandemic.

Still, government handouts are bad for poor people and the working class, they seem to say. On May 12th, for example, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee tweeted, “Work is good for the soul, good for families, and good for Tennessee. We shouldn’t be incentivizing people not to do it.”

When asked why it seemed GOP lawmakers targeted poor people, Eric Atkins with the Tennessee Poor People’s Campaign responded with a question of his own.

“Well, how many lawmakers in Nashville do you think we can classify as poor?” Atkins asked.

Kicking the TennCare Can

If he wanted to, Governor Lee could Thanos-snap his fingers and expand TennCare, flowing $1.4 billion into the state. Lawmakers here have possessed the tools to do this since 2014, even during the tenure of the Trump adminstration. They have not.

Then-Governor Bill Haslam said no to even the thought of it in 2013. Back then, he was arguing with federal officials for his “Tennessee Plan,” a nontraditional, private schema for broader healthcare access. For weeks, Haslam had been dogged with questions on whether he would take the promised $1 billion (at the time) available under the Affordable Care Act to expand TennCare rolls. “Governor Bill Haslam finally had something to say on the issue Wednesday, and it was a very hedged no,” the Memphis Flyer’s politics editor Jackson Baker wrote at the time.

There was a problem with the money then, and it still exists today: the word “Obama.”

“What the governor would like to do, to appease his base, is have access to the Obamacare dollars without subscribing to the Obamacare plan,” state Representative G. A. Hardaway (D-Memphis) told Baker in 2013.

Republicans at the time said the Affordable Care Act was shoved down their throats by a Democratic majority, led by then-President Barack Obama. Right-wing talk show hosts and keyboard warriors vilified Obama, called his healthcare solution “socialist,” and dubbed it “Obamacare.” It’s been a lightning rod Tennessee GOP members still won’t touch.

When asked about years of failure to expand Medicaid here, state Senator Raumesh Akbari (D-Memphis) signaled exasperation and irritation with a “wooooooooo” that indicated the subject was still a hot button. She remembered her days in the House, hearing each day of how much money Tennessee was giving to other states by not expanding Medicaid, but other members at the time said, “We don’t want to be tied to Obama. This is Obamacare.”

She describes the ongoing unwillingness to expand it as a “politics-over-policy situation.” For it, 964 Tennesseans died from 2014 to 2017, according to the latest data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a left-leaning Washington think tank. Many say the decision has also expedited the closure of 13 rural hospitals, the second-most closures in the country behind Texas, according to Becker’s Hospital Review.

“We just went through the worst health crisis in 100 years, and you had people in rural communities who had to be airlifted to Vanderbilt and to parts of Memphis just so they could seek care,” Akbari said. “A lot of our complications from COVID come from chronic diseases that certainly could have been managed better through actual, preventative healthcare.

“And the fact that the federal government is giving us an added financial incentive to expand Medicaid and we don’t, to me, it’s criminal.”

Expanding Medicaid would have a bigger economic hit than Amazon moving to Tennessee, said Michele Johnson, executive director of the Tennessee Justice Center. Pushing $1.4 billion into the state’s economy that would ripple out to businesses and people across the state. It would also save Tennessee taxpayers $900 million over two years. But those facts pale to another.

“We know that people are living shorter lives,” Johnson said. “They’re dying of preventable causes, and they’re suffering in ways that they would not be suffering if they were in most any other state in the nation.”

Lt. Governor Randy McNally (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The door cracked on TennCare expansion earlier this year, but just a tad before it was slammed shut again. High-ranking Republicans, including Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally, said they just wanted to peek at the sweetened pot for Medicaid expansion left by President Joe Biden. It didn’t happen here. Nor did it happen in Alabama or Wyoming, where conservative lawmakers reviewed similar deals for expansion.

Conservatives across the country are softening on expansion, according to a story by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The story said it wasn’t quite a “conservative bandwagon but momentum is certainly moving one direction.” Many states — including red states — are watching the benefits seen with expansion in other states.

Jesse Cross-Call, a senior health policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Pew that “there’s been a ton of evidence showing large gains in healthcare coverage, while helping states economically and keeping rural hospitals open. And it hasn’t hurt state budgets. It remains a really good deal for states to cover hundreds of thousands of people.”

While the door shut on traditional Medicaid expansion, Republicans were catcalling a new, experimental healthcare plan from Governor Lee, approved in the waning days of the Trump administration. That plan, Lee says, would give Tennessee more control of healthcare spending, save $1 billion annually, and, somehow, not change eligibility, meaning the folks who can get TennCare today could get it under his new plan.

In a January tweet, Lee said Tennessee will “lead the nation with our innovative solution to Medicaid,” and “this new flexibility under the block grant model allows us to improve the health of Tennesseans and our communities.” The first reply to his tweet was from @NashvilleChick who wrote, “murderer.”

“Real Ebenezer Scrooge Stuff”

Republicans here never out and out called anyone “lazy.” But though they never used the “l” word in committee meetings or on the floors of their respective houses, they came close, and it was plain they thought it.

In numerous anecdotes, they’d get heated — angry — as they recounted stories of their business buddies who just could not find anyone to hire for their restaurants. One Knoxville House member got so hot, he said he wished Amazon wouldn’t bring any more jobs there; there was no one to work, he huffed into the microphone. The GOP members’ reason, according to their gut and not one single piece of data, was that people were getting government checks and staying on the couch.

State Representative Kevin Vaughan (R-Collierville), sponsor of legislation cutting state benefits, said when people “on the interweb” and “on the Twitter” talk about this issue, “they get pretty passionate.”

“The origins of this bill is financial mathematics on how to make sure that a trust fund is available to the citizens of Tennessee when they need it,” Vaughan began, giving the mechanical, high-minded explanation of the bill that had become his standard rhetoric as he shepherded it through the committee system. But on the House floor for the final vote that day, he didn’t stop himself there. “But we have seen our country in the last six months devolve into a situation where people are counting on and relying on the checks from the government, instead of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and achieving the American dream.”

Vaughan’s bill, co-sponsored by state Senator Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol), cut the amount of time Tennesseans could get state unemployment from 26 weeks (just over six months) to as low as 12 weeks, the lowest in the country. In his nasally Michigander drawl, Lundberg repeated time and again that “the 10-state average of [unemployment benefits in] Southern states is 11.5 weeks. Tennessee is the highest of those states.”

The Republican supermajority, it seemed, wanted to line up at the bottom when it came to how much help they gave to citizens in need. Lundberg’s only regret, he said, was that the new structure could not go into effect any faster than in 2023.

“This is some real Ebenezer Scrooge stuff,” argued state Senator Jeff Yarbro (D-Nashville) from the Senate floor last month. “There is no economic theory that suggests that cutting off benefits actually pushes people to work. Actually, I would say the last 12 months disproves that. You haven’t had a lot of Tennesseeans who’ve just stayed at home over the last 12 months; they’ve gone back and gotten jobs.”

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said last month the bottlenecks in the labor markets could be because of lingering COVID concerns, the inability to find childcare, and more. But he said it “was not clear” that they were caused directly by unemployment checks. But that word from the Fed chair didn’t stop Tennessee Republicans from laying the blame right at the feet of the unemployed.

“To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what world my colleagues from the other caucus are living in,” said state Senator Mike Bell (R-Riceville) on Democrats’ arguments against the cuts. “You go around any county in this state right now, and you see ‘Help Wanted’ signs everywhere. … The jobs are out there, and it’s time we quit incentivizing people staying home.”

A Capitol insider said the benefits cuts were sold by Republicans through anecdotes, not data, and all of them saying one thing: Democrat checks are making folks not want to work anymore.

For instance, Bell pointed to the “guy who is building my cabinets right now,” who is now having to build his own cabinets “because he can’t find anybody to show up for work.” State Representative Eddie Mannis (R-Knoxville) said the workforce in Knoxville was so sorry he complained of 750 new Amazon jobs there, saying, “I’m, like, don’t bring any more jobs or companies here. We don’t have the workforce to fill the jobs we have.” State Representative Pat Marsh (R-Shelbyville) complained he had 100 idle trucks with no one to drive them.

“When you get a mailbox check every week, human nature is you’re sitting at home, and some of those people need to go back to work,” Marsh said. “We have to cut out this giveaway money and get our people back to work.”

State Representative John Ray Clemmons (D-Nashville) attempted to dispel some of what he called this “false narrative” with facts. The max state payout is $275 per week, he explained, or $6.88 per hour, or $1,100 per month, or $13,200 per year. Add $300 in the current federal unemployment benefit, and the number rises to $27,600, just slightly above the federal poverty limit for a family of four, he said.

“The unemployment system is in place for a reason,” Clemmons said, “so don’t use the false narrative that people want to make less than the minimum wage as an excuse for them not filling jobs. Workforce issues in this state have been an ongoing problem.”

It’s clear Governor Lee believes the narrative, though. In an executive action last month, he opted Tennesseans out of the $300 in additional federal unemployment benefits. The day after, he hit send on that tweet about how “work is good for the soul, good for families, and good for Tennessee. We shouldn’t be incentivizing people not to do it.”

“Luxury of Ideology”

The debate on Medicaid expansion is ongoing in 12 states. The debate on unemployment checks and workforce shortages is national as evidenced by the talking-heads’ rhetoric last week following the slightly disappointing May jobs report.

But people here need help now, said Johnson from the Tennessee Justice Center, and they don’t have the luxury of ideology. When asked if it seemed Republicans here actively schemed against poor people, she said it was more a “failure to understand regular Tennesseans.”

“Are our elected officials sitting around trying to figure out how to torture poor people? I don’t think so,” Johnson said. “But I think it’s a lack of accountability and curiosity [of everyday citizens] that is, frankly, very deadly for the people of the state. And I think we’ll be paying for it for generations.”

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