Red States and Disability

My latest in The Nation:

Mostly buried beneath early November’s onslaught of news, stories from Oklahoma, Iowa, and Maine reveal the ways that state governments, through both apparent incompetence and maliciousness, are failing disabled residents and their families. In the first two examples, disability programs are being cut as a result of self-imposed budget crises. In the third, the governor is using disability as a shield to ignore the will of the voters, while at the same time not serving disabled Mainers.

Oklahoma is the worst of the three. At the beginning of November, agencies received letters stating that the “ADvantage Waiver,” a program funding home-based care for disabled individuals and seniors, would lose funding as of December 1. About 21,000 Oklahomans will lose the care that enables them to live independently. About 10,000, according to the Department of Human Services, will be forced to move into nursing homes—except that the state doesn’t have enough beds in nursing homes. So disabled Oklahomans are caught waiting to find out what will happen: Will they be trapped in their homes without services? Will they be forced into nursing homes or Hospitals? Will they be abandoned?

The problem, of course, is money. The conservative state has stripped awayits tax base in a wave of Tea Party glee. Now it’s broke and, rather than raise taxes (a budget just failed to pass in special session), it is closing nursing homes and slashing Medicaid.

Pruitt, the EPA, and Asthma

Cory Booker (Sen-NJ), after laying out all the lawsuits that Scott Pruitt, now nominated to head the EPA, has participated in on behalf of polluters (against the EPA). Booker asked: Do you know how many kids in Oklahoma have asthma?

Pruitt: I do not Senator.

It turns out about 400,000. 10%. He's never "represented" those kids, just the polluters. Pruitt says he can't sue if there's no injury or standing. Booker responds - clearly there's an air pollution problem, but Pruitt hasn't done anything about it.

Here's the clip.


Booker might talk about this in the context of disability instead of disease, if he asked my advice, but it's a good clip, and he didn't.

Read this The Guardian op-ed: Environmental racism is going to get much worse.

Read this on the intensifying and unified Democratic resistance. In it, the author describes the Booker/Pruitt scene as follows:

Today, Cory Booker questioned Scott Pruitt, Trump’s nominee for E.P.A. administrator, who, as Attorney General of Oklahoma, not only joined a dozen industry lawsuits against the E.P.A. but at times directly copied the language of energy-company lawyers in doing so. Booker asked Pruitt if he knew how many children in Oklahoma had asthma. He didn’t, but the answer turned out be a hundred and eleven thousand, a tenth of the children in the state. “You’ve been writing letters on behalf of polluting industries,” Booker said. “I want to ask you, how many letters did you write to the E.P.A. about this health crisis?” Pruitt tried to explain that lawsuits require an injured party and that, in the case of the E.P.A. litigation, the injured parties were the energy corporations. “Injury?” Booker said, drawing out the word, and then he returned to the matter of all those asthmatic kids in Oklahoma.