“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” – Maya Angelou (1928-2014)
I learned the hard way to count on people being who they are. This is especially true of public figures, particularly politicians.
Successful politicians carefully curate a public persona that appeals to the broadest audience possible. Promises are ornately wrapped in saccharine vagaries like “I will fight for …,” “I will stand against …,” “I will blah, blah, blah.”
Vows are to be strenuously avoided, especially when they are about what you won’t do. Promises are breakable. Vows are binding. Vows seed expectations. Broken promises are forgettable. Broken vows are forever.
Freshman MAGA Republican Congressman Rob Bresnahan is learning the difference the hard way. As a candidate and over his seven months in office, he vowed vehemently and repeatedly that he would never vote for cuts to Medicaid.
Then he voted for cuts to Medicaid. As he said in Wednesday’s column, from his perspective – young, healthy, wealthy and white – the $1 trillion hole the Trump budget punched through the social safety net is actually an investment that will make the programs stronger and more efficient.
No independent analysis supports this perspective, but I respect Bresnahan’s willingness to talk on the record about his budget vote and his continued trading of stocks despite his introduction of legislation to ban Congressional trading.
My willingness to listen to his side didn’t sit well with some of his most strident critics. Bresnahan’s straightforward but sketchy explanation for dumping Medicaid-related stock before the budget vote didn’t make either of us any friends. Some of my steadiest supporters were among the most offended.
“The man committed securities fraud at a minimum,” a longtime compatriot and fellow writer I admire commented on my Facebook page.
“Please explain how he committed securities fraud at a minimum. I’m not defending the guy, but that’s a strong statement to make blithely,” I replied.
“What else would you call it?” he countered.
I call it hypocritical. Immoral. Shameful. Greedy. But illegal? No. The idea that acting on information that was globally known for months is somehow “insider trading” or “securities fraud” is ridiculous, and exactly the kind of unhinged hyperbole Trump and his cult trade in.
This is not a defense of Bresnahan, but an acknowledgement of objective reality. Bresnahan and his esteemed colleagues in the House and Senate should stop trading stocks. This includes Nancy Pelosi, who holds millions in investments in Amazon, Google, Nvidia and other mega-corporations, according to Quiver Qualitative, an industry authority.
The 19-term Democrat and former Speaker of the House insists that her husband, Paul, handles all the trading without her input. That doesn’t mitigate her obvious conflict of interest any more than Bresnahan’s claims of ignorance about how his stocks are traded. It’s hypocritical, immoral, shameful and greedy regardless of party affiliation.
KELLY TRADE SECRET: If I manage to anger MAGAs and progressives in the same column, I figure I got something right.
In our conversation, Bresnahan leaned hard on the “waste, fraud and abuse” canard, a rusty Republican saw as tired and toothless as virtually non-existent “voter fraud.”
“American taxpayers will no longer be footing the health care bills for able-bodied adults without dependents that choose not to work,” he said.
Who are these lazy, able-bodied adults and how many of them actually exist? Most working-age Medicaid recipients – 64% – are employed full or part-time, according to KFF, formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation. Most of the rest aren’t working due to disability, caregiving or enrollment in school. Some are simply too old to work or lack transportation and/or childcare.
Is there fraud? Of course, but it’s mainly committed by health care providers who overbill the government. When a provider charges Medicaid for an unnecessary or non-existent treatment, the payment goes to the provider, not the patient.
Hundreds of rural hospitals and Medicaid-dependent nursing homes and clinics across the country are at risk of closing due to the cuts. Bresnahan pointed out that he “fought for” a $50 billion “Rural Health Transformation Program” and demanded it include urban hospitals in his district.
To the average American, $50 billion sounds like a lot of money. For the health care sector, it’s a band-aid on a gaping, growing wound. This one-time transfusion of $50 billion must circulate across all of rural and small-town America, Scranton and Wilkes-Barre included. In that context (objective reality), the hospital fund is a drop in a bottomless bucket. I guess being financially snuffed out counts as “transformation.”
Unlike Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits go directly to recipients, which makes the program vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse. But how much of it actually exists? Bresnahan’s staff provided me with state and national “error rates,” which he said demonstrate a pressing need for reform.
In fiscal year 2024, Pennsylvania had an error rate of 10.6%, slightly lower than the national rate of 10.9%, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. About 2 million Pennsylvanians (15% of the population) rely on SNAP benefits. About 42 million Americans (12.6%) receive SNAP benefits monthly. Factor in the error rates, and we’re talking about 212,000 Pennsylvanians and about 5.3 million Americans erroneously receiving SNAP benefits in a state of 13-plus million and a nation of 340-plus million.
Meanwhile, the state projects that about 144,000 Pennsylvanians will lose SNAP benefits and 310,000 will lose Medicaid coverage. In Bresnahan’s district, 11,572 Pennsylvanians will lose food assistance and 21,637 will have their Medicaid benefits stripped.
I’m famously bad at math, but these numbers don’t add up to savings or increased efficiency. There simply isn’t near enough documented “waste, fraud and abuse” to make a dent in the budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%. Even if all of the unrealistic “savings” projections in Trump’s budget magically come true, they won’t be near enough to cover the shortfalls caused by disappeared tax revenue.
If you support the Medicaid and SNAP cuts, understand that there’s no way they will save as much as you’ve been told. The burden of plugging the gap will surely be laid on the states, meaning YOU. And don’t count on “no taxes on tips and overtime” to soften the blow. Trump’s budget does not exempt tipped income from Social Security, payroll or state taxes. Workers who qualify for tax “cuts” on overtime will not see it reflected in their paychecks. Both “cuts” come in the form of end-of-year deductions. Both are temporary.
Tax cuts for the wealthy are permanent.
So is Bresnahan’s broken vow. It’s too well-documented to be forgotten or forgiven. I don’t believe his rosy projections on the impacts of Trump’s budget bill, but I believe he believes them. I’ve also learned the hard way that true believers – especially those who reject all independent evidence – tend to do real damage in service to their earnest fantasies. One can be sincere and wrong.
As a student at Keystone College, I was on a committee that brought Maya Angelou to speak at Marywood. I had admired her and her work since high school, and was excited to meet her.
Angelou, not so much. She was curt, aloof and imperious, which put me in mind of perhaps her most widely known quote: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
She was right. It’s been 25 years and I still remember. And I still admire Angelou and her work. Even the best of us can have a bad day.
The best-educated guesses on the impacts of Trump’s budget are depressingly dire. Time will tell. The cuts are cynically slated to come after the midterms to give MAGA Republicans like Bresnahan cover as they run for reelection. At the moment, Bresnahan is Pennsylvania’s public face of these cuts, but politically, November 2026 is light years away.
The freshman congressman from the 8th District is new to politics and presently learning one of its hardest lessons – vows come with receipts. They are redeemed at the ballot box. Whether you support him or want him gone, Bresnahan is showing you who he is.
Believe him.
CHRIS KELLY, the Times-Tribune columnist, has no idea how his 401k is performing. Contact the writer: ckelly@scrantontimes.com; @cjkink on X; Chris Kelly, The Times-Tribune on Facebook.