(Is it just me, or isn’t that a song we used to only hear from Democrats?)

From the Rapid City Journal:

The $4.8 billion proposal, which the Republican governor outlined in his annual budget address, includes more than $80 million in new general state spending for the upcoming budget year.

Daugaard’s openness to broadening eligibility for the health coverage program for low-income and disabled people is a departure from many other Republican governors around the country who have steadfastly resisted expanding the Medicaid program in part because of opposition to the federal health overhaul.

Of course, no worries about this additional spending, because it’s supposed to come from “savings” and from “new state money.”

Is that what they’re calling “your tax dollars and mine” today?  “Savings” and “new state money”?  Interesting.

Kudos to the “mainstream” media for at least pointing out that while most Republican governors around the country have enough sense to say “No” to the cocaine of more federal spending on Medicaid, Gov. Daugaard is apparently unencumbered by the restraint historically attributed to Republicans.

It seems we’re supposed to be placated with the claim that expanding Medicaid can be paid for “in part by expanding access to services that are fully funded by the federal government.”  So sticking our fellow Americans in other states with the bill (in part) makes it alright?

Besides, the last time I checked Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution (as well as the rest of the U.S. Constitution), there was no constitutional authority for the federal government to run a health care program such as Medicaid.

Yes, I distinctly remember “Father of the Constitution” James Madison saying something in Federalist No. 45 about the federal government–and the U.S. Constitution which defines and limits it–being concerned primarily with EXTERNAL matters, not the internal affairs of the states.

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.

“We the people” (who are the ones on the hook to pay for all this “free stuff”) are supposed to be mollified by statements that the money is really there (ostensibly without having to pay more) because more money rolled into state coffers than anticipated (though where it rolled in from, we’re not really supposed to think about).

We’re also not supposed to think too much about the reality that if we can undershoot estimates for savings and expenditures one year…we can easily overshoot them in another year, and suddenly we’re even more fully behind the 8-ball to pay for all this extra “free stuff” we commissioned in more rosy times. No, let’s not think about that at all.

A person can say anything they want, and they can even put whatever letter they want after their name, but that doesn’t make it so.  As the greatest man who ever lived once said, “You will recognize them by their fruits.”

When someone mentions the “Republican” control of state government we supposedly have in South Dakota, I just laugh (it’s that, or cry).  We might actually have a Republican government in this state…if we didn’t have so many Democrats-with-an-R-after-their-name in the Republican Party.

As a Republican since I became a teenager, I really would like to be more supportive of Republicans…if only I could find some in government.

*** Bob Ellis *** Is a conservative author  and Life and Liberty News contributor

      Read more from Bob Ellis and other conservative authors at American Clarion