Caught on Tape: Democrats Once Loved Medicaid Work Requirements

According to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Republican plans to tighten Medicaid a little bit are not just unwise. They will trigger mass murder.

Due to its comparative fiscal sanity, Schumer rechristened the Trump/GOP One Big Beautiful Bill as the “We Are All Going to Die Act.”

Speaking on the Senate floor Wednesday, Schumer predicted “harsh cuts where people lose health care, where people’s premiums go up, where hospitals close, nursing homes close, and people are laid off.” Schumer asked about the Republicans: “Why are they being so mean? Why are they being so cruel?”

Republicans should laugh off such histrionics by Schumer and his fellow Democrats.

The GOP’s homicidal plans include kicking illegal aliens off Medicaid. Good riddance! Illegal aliens invaded America and have no right to be here. Ergo they have no right to public assistance. Snatch the pills and potions from their grubby hands and send them home!

These Republican killers also will scour Medicaid for mismanagement and prosecute those who defraud this health program for needy Americans. What on Earth is wrong with that?

The third serving of GOP cyanide is a rule that able-bodied, childless Medicaid recipients must work, train, or volunteer for at least 20 hours per week. This Republican reform rests on bedrock. Just ask the Democrat heavyweights who have championed work requirements for those on Medicaid and other government assistance.

•“For too many, welfare has been a way of life,” Vice President Al Gore said in 1996, embracing welfare reform. “For too long, it has condemned too many on welfare to a lifetime at the margins of our society. Today we start to change all that.”

•Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., said that year: “Anyone who wants to receive welfare must sign an individual responsibility contract so that they are forced to agree up front to the conditions placed on receiving the benefit … the mandatory work requirement for anyone receiving welfare.”

•“They actually have charged and run ads saying that President [Barack] Obama wants to weaken the work requirements in the welfare reform bill I signed that moved millions of people from welfare to work,” President Bill Clinton told the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. “Wait, the requirement was for more work, not less. I am telling you, the claim that President Obama weakened welfare reform’s work requirement is just not true.”

•Obama told Georgetown University in 2015: “The best anti-poverty program is a job, which confers not just income, but structure and dignity, and a sense of connection to community.”

Grabien—a private company that efficiently and economically archives audio-video clips, including mine—produced a priceless supercut that showcases these quotes, in living color. No one makes the Republican case for Medicaid work requirements better than the most powerful Democrats of the last 30 years.

“That Americans shouldn’t make welfare a way of life used to be one of the few areas on which everyone agreed,” Grabien founder Tom Elliott tells me. “The American dream united Republicans and Democrats under the common belief that in America anyone can achieve anything. But today’s Democratic Party would have you believe that the real American dream is waiting for your welfare check to clear so you can buy your family a round of McNuggets off the dollar menu and then have Medicaid help pay for your monthly insulin shots.”

Grabien’s video is a powerful weapon in the fight for the One Big Beautiful Bill and its Medicaid work requirements.

“House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana and other Republican leaders should play these clips at press conferences, hearings, and as commercials—anything to highlight the sad reality that today’s Democratic Party exists for the express purpose of enslaving an ever-larger class of Americans into lives of government dependency.”

Making able-bodied Americans work, train, or volunteer half-time for their benefits is a small way to maintain Medicaid as a hand-up, not a hammock.

The post Caught on Tape: Democrats Once Loved Medicaid Work Requirements appeared first on The Daily Signal.