Womack, a liar, calls us liars

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is by far the most significant thing Congressional Republicans, including ours in Arkansas, have accomplished this term, yet they don’t want to talk about what it actually does.

Indivisible NWA, a community group standing up for democracy and accountable government, held a town hall yesterday about the impacts of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a cutesy name for a trillion-dollar flamethrower aimed at Medicaid, hungry people, immigrants and others. As experts from Arkansas Advocates for Children & Families and elsewhere said at the town hall, more than 100,000 Arkansans will lose hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of health insurance and food assistance because of this law, all while tax cuts lopsidedly benefit the wealthy.

“Bottom line, our Arkansas workforce will suffer, our children will suffer, and it’s a mess,” said Kathy Grisham, who was CEO for years at Community Clinic NWA, a network of local clinics serving low-income patients regardless of their ability to pay. (Note she was speaking for herself only, not the clinic.) It’s not just Medicaid recipients affected, she added, with prices also rising in the private insurance marketplace, more people going without coverage and hospitals that serve us all risking closure.

Lost funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP and food stamps, means Arkansas could face the choice of picking up the slack or letting the program wither away, said Laura Kellams, Northwest Arkansas director at Arkansas Advocates. The state also has an exceptionally high hunger rate.

“At the state level, we’re going to have to fight for these programs,” Kellams said. “That is an optional program, so this is a real existential threat.”

Indivisible invited our congressman, Rep. Steve Womack, and our senators, Tom Cotton and John Boozman, to come and explain their votes for this bill and hear what it is they’ve unleashed. Womack declined; no answer from the others. Possibly in response, Womack on Friday dedicated his regular email newsletter to the big ugly bill. But even then he wouldn’t be honest about the law’s contents.

“For months, Democrats have stirred up confusion and fear claiming Republicans made massive cuts to Medicaid in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). This simply isn’t true,” he wrote, pointing to what he called its “reasonable” work requirements for low-income families and “enhanced program integrity measures” to cut “waste, fraud, and abuse.” “I think we can all agree that protecting both the most vulnerable and our hard-earned taxpayer dollars is a necessary and commendable endeavor.”

We can all agree with this sugary rhetorical confection, yes, but it’s nothing but misdirection (or should I say fraud?). Dealing with abuse is a small sliver of the bill’s cuts, according to an analysis from the University of Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy. Most of the cutting comes from red tape, jumping through hoops or, as I recently learned to call it, sludge.

That’s a term in customer service for the calls, the emails, the forms, the wait times, the endless hold music — everything that makes it a pain in the ass to do what you need to do, taking up time until you have to leave for work or make dinner. Eventually people simply give up and go without the thing they need, whether that’s a something small, like a question answered, or something big, like a family health insurance policy.

It’s deliberate, whether from a private company or, now, our own federal government. And it’s what the Republican Party in Congress and Arkansas wants, even if they act otherwise: for people to give up on the services that are supposed to help them. We’ve already seen this show in Arkansas.

Womack in his newsletter threw in a second big fib, this time about the tax cuts: “Despite what you may have heard, OBBA does not prioritize the ultra-rich over our most vulnerable,” he wrote, noting that a typical family of four making a typical salary will get a tax cut of $1,500. But notice he didn’t acknowledge — or deny — that a much wealthier family gets a much bigger tax cut, or that the tax cut for lower incomes will be washed away by all the safety-net cuts.

Basically, if your household isn’t in the six figures, the overall effect is either negligible or bad, per the Congressional Budget Office. Watch who you’re calling a liar, Steve.

One more thing: We didn’t hear from our representatives at the town hall, but they can still hear from us.

• Rep. Steve Womack: Call 202-225-4301 or visit/mail a message to 3333 S. Pinnacle Hills Parkway, Ste. 120, Rogers, AR 72758.

• Sen. John Boozman: Call 202-224-4843 or visit/mail a post card to 213 W. Monroe, Ste. N, Lowell, AR 72745.

• Sen. Tom Cotton: Call 202-224-2353 or visit/mail a message to 3333 S. Pinnacle Hills Parkway, Ste. 425, Rogers, AR 72758.