There is an adage, misattributed to both Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, that suggests, “Better to stay quiet and let people say you’re stupid than to talk and prove they’re right.”
While it appears that neither Sam Clemens nor Honest Abe provided that piece of advice, it’s obvious who ought to take heed — Rep. Jamie Comer, R-TheFrankfortLoop.
Jamie runs around with enough egg on his face to open a Bob Evans Restaurant. As chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, he hops like a bunny from one right-wing cable television outlet or radio call-in show to another, offering a beaming countenance and a locution that makes Junior Samples sound like Sir John Gielgud, providing takes on subjects often with little attachment to reality.
We all recall his pursuit of former President Joe Biden and his reference to the Biden Crime Family, over his easily disproven claim that the then-president benefitted from the business interests of his son, Hunter. Meanwhile, he has nothing to say about the family of the current president-cum-dictator, Donald J. Trump, pocketing millions, if not billions, of dollars as a result, at least in part, of his cryptocurrency policies.
And then there’s the whole, embarrassing episode over Biden’s use of the autopen, which is too silly to go into here, and how the then-president was so addled he didn’t know what he was doing — although he was bright enough, in Jamie’s view of the world, to run a spectacular crime family.
Now Jamie is expanding his horizons, God save us all, and taking up race-baiting, which seems to be a practice increasingly employed by a lot of Republican politicians these days — just ask Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington, about his successful campaign for the commonwealth’s GOP Senate nomination last month.
It all started about a week ago when Jamie started yapping about his claim that “minority communities” in Democratic states are somehow “especially” responsible for “rampant fraud” in the nation’s Medicaid program.
Ah, the old blame the Black folks canard. There is no evidence that the nation’s “minority communities’’ — you know, Black folks – are somehow banding together to steal money from Medicaid. There may be fraud occurring but it certainly isn’t limited to Black individuals.
In 2002, for instance, as part of what at the time was the largest health care fraud settlement in the nation’s history, HCA agreed to, among other things, pay the U.S. government $631 million, plus interest, and $17.5 million to state Medicaid agencies. The chairman and CEO of HCA while all this frauding was going on was a White guy named Rick Scott, who is now a U.S. senator from Florida.
But Comer’s frolicking in the fields of race baiting doesn’t end there. During an appearance earlier this month on One American News, yet another right-wing outlet he favors, to discuss Medicaid fraud, Jamie went off on a tangent about fellow lawmaker Rep. Shontel Brown, D-OH, who is Black.
Asserting that fraud is rampant, Comer said “there are certain minority groups’’ that have become “professionals at manipulating’’ the system.
Do you really want to go there?
“I feel like if you watch the Democrats in our Oversight Committee hearing and you listen to the witnesses when you say, ‘Why hasn’t something been done?’’ they say, ‘Oh, it’s racist if you do,”’ Comer claimed. “That’s the Democrats buzzword, you know, it’s racist. if you if you go after any type of fraudster, that’s a minority or and they were calling us racist. And, you know, you have Rep. Shontel Brown, you know, her sole purpose in life is more welfare, more welfare for her people, you know, and my people are sick and tired of paying for welfare for able bodied people.’’
Well, no Jamie. You’re not being called racist for your anti-fraud initiatives, some of which passed the House this week. It’s that you’re identifying an entire group of people who have traditionally been relegated to the back of the bus with employing underhanded schemes to play the system based on no evidence. To portray minority groups essentially coalescing to defraud the federal government plays to old racist tropes about Blacks and regurgitates the old White people tendency to talk about and shake their heads about “those people.’’
So, yeah, that’s pretty racist.
Why Comer decided to pick on Brown out of the blue can only be determined by pouring through his muddled mind, a project no one is likely to volunteer to undertake. Brown, reacting to Comer’s claims, said to him, “you’re not even hiding it anymore. When you talk about your people versus my people, not only is it divisive, but it’s giving racist.”
“…this is not about my people versus your people,’’ Brown said. “This is about everyone being able to have healthcare, the healthcare that they need, the healthcare that they deserve.”
To hear Jamie tell it, the good folks in his mostly Western Kentucky district are picking up the tab for the Black layabouts in Brown’s part of the world, a notion hard to defend when you consider the First District isn’t exactly a Beverly Hills rolling in the dough kind of place. While the Ohio 11th and Kentucky First are dramatically different demographically, they are both significantly dependent on Medicaid.
Brown’s congressional district is anchored in Cleveland, once an industrial giant that began a long slide in the 1950s with the closing of steel mills and other plants. The district, according to census data, is racially split almost evenly, with about 43.6 percent of the population Black and 42.3 percent White.
That differs markedly from the Kentucky First Congressional District represented by Comer, a strangely shaped, primarily rural abomination, created by the legislature to protect the interests of both Comer and Barr, who was happy to drop the state capital dominated by Democrats from his political environs. It stretches more than 250 miles from the Mississippi River to Frankfort and is very White — 84 percent White and six percent Black.
But, like Ohio’s 11th District, it is not particularly sturdy economically. The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy reports that 235,530 residents are covered by Medicaid, or 32.4 percent of the population. That is the second highest total in the state, trailing only the 5th District in the commonwealth’s southeastern corner, with 316,450 covered by Medicaid, or 44.1 percent.
Brown’s district in Ohio is more Medicaid defendant than any district in Kentucky, measuring 326,700 enrollees, according to KFF. But among adults the numbers are much closer, with 41,800 in the Kentucky First on Medicaid and 60,800 in the Ohio 11th, with the changing picture attributed to the large number of children on Medicaid in Cleveland.
At any rate, given those numbers, Comer is on extremely thin ice — in fact, he’s already fallen to the lake bottom — when he complains “my people are sick and tired of paying for welfare for able bodied people’’ elsewhere.
What makes Comer’s claims even dumber is Kentucky’s position as a so-called recipient state — it receives more money back from the federal government than it sends in as taxes. In fact, according to the Wallethub website, the commonwealth ranks second, behind only Alaska, as the most federally dependent state in the nation. The World Population Review reports Kentucky’s return on tax dollars this year is $1.68, meaning that for every dollar Kentucky residents send to the federal government, they receive about $1.68 back in federal spending.
So, despite Jamie’s claim, folks in Tompkinsville aren’t sending any money to any welfare queens in Cleveland.
Perhaps Jamie’s point is almost 90 percent of his district is White and more than 40 percent of Brown’s district – “more welfare for her people’’ — is Black, meaning, of course, the First is getting everything it deserves and Ohio 11 constitutes a bunch of beggars.
And Brown is right — it is a health care debate. Medicaid cuts are endangering the health of millions of Americans. Maybe Comer can ditch the holier-than-thou schtick and realize unfairly splitting folks along racial lines ain’t getting them decent health care.