MAGA Congressman Steve Scalise (R-LA) worked hard with House Speaker and fellow Louisiana lawmaker Mike Johnson to justify the giant cuts in Medicaid targeted in the Trump agenda “big, beautiful bill.”
House legislators, who passed an earlier version of the bill and sent it to the Senate on a 215-214 vote, passed a final version of the controversial bill this afternoon fulfilling marching orders from the President to get it done by July 4. No Democrats were on board and only two Republican dissenters held their ground: Brian Fitzpatrick (PA) and Thomas Massie (KY).
With primary threats and party ostracization hanging over the heads of apostate Republicans, Scalise was among those giving reluctant GOP members political cover, trotting out tropes about “waste and fraud” among Medicaid recipients who he says don’t really need or deserve the government help.
(Cuts to Medicaid are the most politically fraught aspect of the bill, especially for legislators in districts with large numbers of constituents who rely on the assistance.)
Scalise: Able-bodied people—35-year-old sitting at home playing video games. They’ll have to get a job. That’s good for them because their mom doesn’t want them sitting in the basement playing video games anyway. pic.twitter.com/iGYfD21jSI
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 3, 2025
Scalise put a face on a very important distinction that Republicans wanted to sell their constituents. The Congressman took the House floor asking people to believe that — through the big bill’s cuts — Medicaid would be made better: more efficient and more user-friendly for those recipients who truly need it.
The bill, he asserted, will ensure that the truly deserving Medicaid recipients won’t be “crowded out” by non-deserving recipients, one version of which Scalise portrayed as 35-year-old video gamers in basements whose mothers are exasperated.
Indeed, Scalise floated the notion that cutting $800+ billion from the program — as the big bill does — will not impact truly needful, but instead that the cuts will in effect help ensure that people who really need the aid will get it with less trouble and friction. Less “crowding out.”
[NOTE: The stereotype of the nefarious public assistance grifter long used to incite rage among the tax-paying public was once primarily urban mothers with many children who were “on the dole” at the expense of hard-working middle-class suburbanites. But since Medicaid reaches a broader demographic than SNAP-type programs fueling the former stereotype, and because Medicaid cuts will impact white seniors and white children in rural areas and suburbs, the video gaming grifter in mom’s basement — who allegedly could be working — is Scalise’s contemporary choice of villain.]
The bill, Scalise further said, will actually help these subterranean millennial gamers live a more fulfilling life enhanced by gainful employment, a self-sufficient life that Scalise implies dependence on unnecessary public assistance has denied them. “This is good for them,” the Congressman said, and also for their long-suffering mothers.
(Oddly, perhaps, Scalise never suggests that these fabled basement-dwelling video gamers should be punished — rather than helped — for gaming the Medicaid system, despite his clear claim that they are essentially robbing other Americans of either money or aid.)
Scalise’s baseless stereotyping of Medicaid recipients as lazy gamers ignores the real economic barriers and systemic issues that prevent many from working, perpetuating harmful myths to justify cruel policy cuts.
— Richard Angwin (@RichardAngwin) July 3, 2025
Not everyone agrees — see above — that the reconciliation bill’s purpose is to help able-bodied gamers feel better about themselves while they go cold turkey on ‘Call of Duty’ and start delivering packages or landscaping.
Some — among them every Democrat in Congress — believe that the bill’s chief agenda is to deliver tax cuts to the rich and pay for these cuts with savings from Medicaid — a reverse Robin Hood that robs from the least advantaged. “It would take food and medicine from the poor,” writes The American Prospect, “and give the money to the rich.”