When pressure makes principled righties go wobbly

Ramesh Ponnuru's column at Bloomberg today asserts that Ohio's governor is on the wrong path on a rather important issue:

Kasich is one of several Republican governors trying to do the same balancing act: opposing Obamacare while taking its Medicaid money. He pushed Ohio to participate in this expansion over the objections of many state Republicans. His remarks highlight the difficulty his party is having on Medicaid -- and point to a weakness that could hurt his chance at the presidential nomination.

Medicaid is structured in a way that makes it hard even for Republican governors to resist its expansion. Even before Obamacare passed, when a state would increase Medicaid benefits, the federal government would typically pick up half the cost. So governors and state lawmakers could offer voters two dollars of benefits for every dollar in taxes they imposed. Other states' taxpayers would make up the difference.

Obamacare offers an exaggerated version of this deal, in which the federal government picks up almost all of the extra costs of the Medicaid expansion. A state that opts out of the expansion doesn't save money; it just sees its tax dollars go to other states.

Why do governors like Kasich do it?

Few of them are doing it because they want to seem like compassionate conservatives (Kasich stands alone in vigorously making that case). They're doing it because, looked at from the narrow perspective of a state with no concern about federal spending, it simply makes sense to take the money -- and it makes sense even if Medicaid provides few health benefits for the people who receive it.
Conservatives have tried to counter this budget logic, but not very persuasively. They say that the federal government, facing a long-term debt problem, might one day renege on its deal and stop covering all the Medicaid costs it says it will. That's not a prediction that fits well with the federal track record, or with the picture conservatives usually paint of reckless federal spending.

This "compassionate conservatism" stuff (who the hell thought up that term, anyway?) can even infect great men like the governor of proud and prosperous Texas:

Kasich is in a class of his own on the issue. He has repeatedly suggested that those who oppose the Medicaid expansion are showing a lack of Christian charity toward the poor. It's an argument reminiscent of Texas Governor Rick Perry's line, in a 2011 debate, that those who oppose in-state tuition for the kids of illegal immigrants are heartless. Kasich's argument is also opportunistic. He never proposed this kind of Medicaid expansion when he was in Congress, and would almost certainly not have found it so compelling if he had to find a way to pay for it. 

These are busy men, with full daily schedules and many issues, from the detailed and pragmatic to the lofty and timeless, on their plates.  They meet hundreds of people weekly.  Still, is it too much to ask of them that they remember the demarcation between volitional charity and coerced state remedies to people's challenges?

When you waver from your conservative principles, you open the door to being mired in all kinds of nonsense.

Never do it.