Who all this foofaraw really hurts is ... surprise!

Ruth Marcus writes in today's WaPo on the requirement to prove citizenship to get benefits:

The provision at issue would repeal a 2006 requirement that everyone applying for Medicaid provide proof of citizenship -- passports or original birth certificates. That might sound sensible, but it has been a cumbersome, expensive solution to a non-problem.

In 2005, when he was overseeing the Medicaid program for the Bush administration, Mark McClellan noted that an inspector general's investigation did "not find particular problems regarding false allegations of citizenship, nor are we aware of any."

Because many Medicaid applicants don't have such papers easily at hand -- they're not the passport-carrying types -- the requirement has resulted in tens of thousands of eligible children being denied coverage or kicked off the rolls and has cost states millions of dollars to administer.

In Virginia, for instance, during the first nine months of implementation, the state's Medicaid rolls fell by 11,000 children -- even as the number of children enrolled in SCHIP, the parallel program for children in families earning slightly more, continued to rise. The impact wasn't on Hispanic children, whose families tend to have documents available and whose enrollment numbers continued to increase, but on white and African American children.

Of course, the GOP's constituency doesn't care much about poor whites or blacks - the ones who don't routinely have documentation. It's the same group that gets hammered in those "voting registration" plans the GOP is so fond of, though there you can add in the elderly poor, especially blacks, who never did have "government paperwork", and the same ones coming up on the second anniversary of Katrina with nothing to show for the government's promises, and the same ones who ... well, you get the picture. The GOP doesn't give a damn about them. But - thankfully - the days are long past when they can actually campaign against them.

Lewis Black remarked on The Daily Show a while ago that "When it comes to hate, Mexican really is the new black." With right-wing commentators announcing that immigrants are responsible for everything from the Minneapolis bridge collapse (too many immigrants driving on the roads, you know) to the (non-existent) leprosy epidemic (not) ravaging America, it's beginning to look very much as if he's right.