Josh Hawley’s Medicaid flip-flop-flip proves he’s unreliable for voters | Opinion

Josh Hawley wants a do-over.

He probably isn’t going to get one.

Missouri’s senior U.S. senator on Tuesday announced a new bill to reverse the big Medicaid cuts that were part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill that Hawley himself voted for — all of two weeks ago.

“President Trump has always said we have to protect Medicaid for working people,” Hawley said in a press release accompanying this week’s new legislation. “Now is the time to prevent any future cuts to Medicaid from going into effect.”

This is darkly hilarious for several reasons.

Trump impact

First of all, it’s true that Trump has said repeatedly that America should protect Medicaid. But Trump also pushed for passage of the bill that cuts Medicaid. And then he signed the bill cutting Medicaid in a big ceremony on July 4, just to make sure everybody got the point.

What the president does and what he says are often two different things. Just ask the MAGA folks who thought Trump would release the Epstein files.

Second: It’s pretty clear that Hawley is trying to claw back some deservedly lost credibility on the Medicaid issue. He catapulted himself back into the spotlight in May with a New York Times guest commentary telling his fellow not to cut Medicaid.

Slashing the program, Hawley wrote then, would be “morally wrong and politically suicidal.”

He was right.

Also: He ended up voting for Trump’s bill anyway.

The result: Tens of thousands of Missourians are likely to lose their health care coverage when the cuts officially take effect a few years down the road.

If we want to be charitable, we could say that Hawley didn’t have much choice but to vote for the cuts. They came as part of an omnibus spending package that included a lot of conservative Republican priorities that Hawley did like. There was a huge amount of pressure on the senator to be a team player and get the whole enchilada passed. It was, as they say, “all or nothing.”

But why be charitable?

Hawley chose “all.” Missourians on Medicaid will get the “nothing” part. It didn’t have to be that way.

After all, the One Big Beautiful Bill passed the Senate by a 51-50 vote. Vice President JD Vance cast the tiebreaker. If just one more Senate Republican — Hawley, say — had flipped their vote, the legislation would not have passed.

Hawley had leverage. He didn’t use it. Medicaid got cut as a result.

GOP ‘soul-searching’ for working class?

At least Hawley had the good sense to act bashful about his choice.

“I think, frankly, my party needs to do some soul-searching,” he told reporters. “If you want to be a working-class party, you’ve got to deliver for working-class people.”

Hawley might want to do a little soul-searching himself, though.

After all, it’s not clear that Hawley’s new bill — the Protect Medicaid and Rural Hospitals Act — is actually meant to “deliver” for the working class.

Why? Because it’s not going anywhere in the GOP-controlled Congress. The bill “is unlikely to garner the support needed to become law,” The New York Times reported this week.

That makes Hawley’s new measure a so-called “messaging” bill — legislation designed to attract good attention to the person sponsoring it without actually doing anything.

Pointless, in other words.

We are left, then, to draw some conclusions about Hawley.

One is that he is unreliable. After all, the senator went from pro-Medicaid rhetoric to voting against it and back again all in the span of a few weeks. That’s quite a journey, even in the flip-flop environment of Washington politics.

Alternatively, we might decide that Hawley simply has contempt for voters. He wants credit for being pro-worker and pro-Medicaid even though his most meaningful acts — his votes — go in the opposite direction. He’s like a child who wants praise for good intentions while standing in the middle of the mess he helped make.

I suspect and hope voters are smarter than that.

What we do know is this: By making an issue of Medicaid, both before and after the Trump bill vote, Hawley keeps inviting us to judge him and his party on the matter. We should do so. There are only so many do-overs.

This story was originally published July 17, 2025 at 12:08 PM.