The Most Alarming Case On The Supreme Court's Docket You Haven't Heard Of (Medicaid)
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/supreme-court-medicaid-section-1983No paywall
https://archive.ph/OW372
There’s a sleeper case on the Supreme Court’s docket that could blow a gaping hole in the social safety net and give states leeway to neglect or end care for tens of millions of the most vulnerable Americans.
“This case is to Medicaid what Dobbs was to abortion,” Sara Rosenbaum, professor of health law and policy at George Washington University’s school of public health, told TPM.
And it’s not just Medicaid, though the program enrolling nearly 90 million Americans is the biggest one at risk. This case could leave all of those who depend on federally funded, state-administered programs — think SNAP (formerly known as food stamps) or WIC, which helps low-income pregnant women and mothers with young children buy food — without any recourse, should states stop providing the benefits they’re required to give.
The echoes of Dobbs are eerie.
Here too, the Court’s decision to take up the case surprised and alarmed experts in equal measure. There was no circuit court split, no raging lower court controversy to settle. It was a fairly run-of-the-mill case, not unlike hundreds that had come before. A county in a red state, eyeing the right-wing composition of the Court, calculated that the time was ripe to lodge a bigger ask, to use a pedestrian vehicle to do away with a broader right it opposes. And the justices quietly took it up — dragging behind them a paper trail peppered with their inclination to overturn 50 years of precedent.
*snip*
= new reply since forum marked as read
They want to kill us...they will.
Too bad our side says increasing the court is NOT an option. 
Just too personal for TOO MANY to ignore!
Large communes with barbed wire fences?
Glad I got some skills!
Just too personal for TOO MANY to ignore!
Large communes with barbed wire fences?
Glad I got some skills!
the working classes, and that includes most of the middle class by any definition. That's because the very class-hierarchical economists' definition is obsolete, a carryover from the days when many "working class" people didn't even graduate from elementary school, much less often have post high-school education. And from when most work was very low paid (there was much less wealth to go around) and included some level of manual labor, such as grueling work in laundries. Basically, the old working class was where the old middle class "professionals" got their servants and poor factory workers. Not any more.
Today most who would once have been working class by the old definition work at higher skill levels for more money, even those who feel exploited and underpaid; some make very good incomes. They're typically much better educated, have much higher standards of living and live far more sophisticated and socially mobile lives. They go to many of the same restaurants and concerts and take the same planes on vacations that professionals do, albeit less often.
Above all, Shazam, I reject the old economists' definition of middle class because almost everyone does. Most people see themselves as middle class because it makes sense to them. It's a multilevel vertical range, but even the more modest earners know they live at an enviably higher level of wellbeing and security than those who have to struggle (and are in danger of failing) to meet basic needs, but that they don't share the privileges of the wealthy classes. Unmistakably middle by the most meaningful measures to them.
However, back to what's happening, most conservatives are naturally hierarchical. They understand and feel comfortable with class differences and some degree of authoritarian government to maintain the social order. Our liberal egalitarianism and social mobility with blurred, even almost invisible lines, tends to feel wrong and chaotic.
I agree what we're seeing is RW extremists with the bit in their teeth rejecting the liberal egalitarian (dis)order by trying to return our nation to the good old, pre-modern, order of defined class differences -- where most people are low income, educated only enough to "meet the needs of local industry" (Gov. Scott Walker) and stay in their place.
Fwiw, this nation is so wealthy that I don't think it's so much that they feel a need to severely underpay workers in order to live luxuriously themselves, it's more that belief in the "natural order" means that inferior classes are supposed to have less than superior.
Btw, I believe they can't possibly succeed. That's implicit in the self image of most Americans, including conservatives, as "middle class" with middle class privileges. They could of course do a lot of harm, though, and have been for some while.
Absolutely. Terrifying. 
