The Republican Governor of Ohio, Gov. John R. Kasich, is not taking a page from his fellow Republicans.
For those paying attention, Republicans have blocked, filibustered and massacred all proposed bills whose purpose was to help the poor. So when a Republican of any stripe stand up and bucks his party’s wish to see poor Americans suffer, we will cover that… bucking.
“I’m concerned about the fact there seems to be a war on the poor,” Kasich said, as quoted by the New York Times. “That if you’re poor, somehow you’re shiftless and lazy.”
“You know what?” he said. “The very people who complain ought to ask their grandparents if they worked at the W.P.A.”
The Republican governor last week even “circumvented his own Republican legislature and its Tea Party wing by using a little-known state board to expand Medicaid to 275,000 poor Ohioans under President Obama’s health care law.”
But don’t be fooled however. Kasich has a well documented past of falling in line with his party and their war on the poor. In 2011, he even tried to take away the people’s collective bargaining rights, a move that resulted in a nosedive for his approval ratings and an eventual loss at the polls as the good people of Ohio rejected his union busting bill.
I don’t think Kasich has fully turned away from his party’s war on the poor, but these little steps in this direction is noteworthy.
