(BigGovernment.news) You can tell it’s a new presidential campaign cycle, because many of the candidates seem to have forgotten how controversial public policies were adopted with their assistance.
One of them is low-polling Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a RINO running for the GOP presidential nomination.
As reported by Watchdog.org, in order to get the Obamacare Medicaid expansion implemented Kasich sort of pulled a President Obama by going around the state legislature in 2013 to implement the policy, yet that’s not what he’s saying on the campaign trail.
Here’s the story.
In February 2013 Kasich introduced a budget that included Medicaid expansion to working-age adults who did not have children and had no disabilities, part of the 2010 Obamacare law. For the next several months Kasich pressed the state legislature to pass the expansion.
As documented by Watchdog.org, here’s out it all played out:
— First, the Ohio House stripped the Obamacare Medicaid expansion from its version of the 2014-15 budget;
— Next, the General Assembly explicitly banned the expansion in a final 2014-15 budget sent to the governor’s office;
— Using a line-item veto, Kasich struck the legislature’s ban on the expansion;
— Then, the Kasich administration, with approval from the Obama administration, unilaterally expanded Medicaid as per the Obamacare guidelines;
— The governor’s office then requested that the Ohio Controlling Board appropriate funding for the expansion;
— The board approved Kasich’s expansion funding request;
— Six GOP lawmakers and two right-to-life groups sued over the controlling board tactic but the Ohio Supreme Court ruled in the governor’s favor.
Does that sound like honoring the will of the people, a majority of whom elected representatives to the General Assembly to oppose the expansion?
What’s more, like Obama has done when he’s used his “pen and phone” approach to bypassing Congress, Kasich has attempted to justify his actions by intimating that despite the fact that the General Assembly rejected his expansion efforts, somehow the people were better served because the controlling board, appointed by the legislature’s leadership, decided in his favor.
In other words, he used a political tactic to bypass the GOP majority in his legislature who did not want the expansion to get his way.
Former state Rep. John Adams, the fourth-ranking member of the Ohio House majority leadership at the time, told Watchdog.org he was never involved in any such conversation.
“They did not have a caucus meeting to tell everybody, ‘this is what we’re going to do,’” Adams explained. “I’m amazed that this governor wants to throw Bill Batchelder and Keith Faber under the bus, even though they were complicit.”
It gets more absurd. In recent days Kasich told New Hampshire voters in the days before the primary that his latest budget continues Medicaid expansion “without one single objection” from lawmakers.
Only:
Republican State Rep. Nino Vitale told Watchdog.org he was one of several legislators to protest inclusion of the expansion in Ohio’s 2016-17 budget. Vitale spoke against the policy on the House floor before voting against the budget. Three other Republicans in the General Assembly joined him. All four cited the Medicaid expansion as a specific reason for their votes, and several lawmakers voted for the budget only after voicing opposition to the expansion.
And there is this: Since its expansion, Medicaid has enrolled an additional 650,000 people in Ohio, costing taxpayers $6.4 billion – or about $1.5 billion more than he promised Ohio voters it would cost.
Sound familiar?
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