When Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann spoke last month in favor of making junior college tuition-free throughout Mississippi, few seemed to notice that this proposal was neither novel nor all that Republican.
Almost nine years ago, Barack Obama, while he was president of the United States, advocated the same idea for the entire nation.
Should that history become better-known, it will be curious to see whether that kills Hosemann’s push, just the way that Obama’s connection to Medicaid expansion has torpedoed it for more than a decade among the state’s Republican leadership.
Because Medicaid expansion was a facet of the Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare, it became a difficult sell in Republican-dominated states. The opposition to expansion was not rooted in the economics of it but largely because it was affiliated with a liberal Democratic president. That’s why Mississippi has remained one of the 10 holdouts, with Gov. Tate Reeves just recently winning reelection as an unbending opponent of Medicaid expansion.
He called it welfare and said Mississippi has too much of that already. It will be interesting to see whether Reeves feels the same way about free tuition at the state’s two-year colleges.
Twenty-eight counties, by the way, are already providing that benefit to their residents.
