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Tennessee’s Healthcare System: Forced Into a Corner

Imagine the predicament on Tuesday of Wendy Long, director of Health Care Finance and Administration for the state of Tennessee, as well as, crucially, director of the state’s TennCare program, Tennessee’s version of Medicaid. Long, also a physician, was the scheduled luncheon speaker of the Rotary Club of Memphis at the Universitry Club, and, if she was late in taking her seat, it was, she would explain, because she was tuned into various news sources to get the latest news coming from Capitol Hill in Washington.

As it happened, Tuesday was also the day that Mitch McConnell (R-KY), majority leader of the U.S. Senate, had indicated he would require a vote in that august deliberative body relative to pending legislation regarding a possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) and/or a possible replacement measure to govern the nation’s national health-care policy.

If that has a vague sound to it, it’s because McConnell’s intentions were indeed vague, as would be whatever mechanism he trotted forth for the unsuspecting Senators to deal with. McConnell’s legislative gambit on health care this week was even more a mystery than the one he laid before the Senate two weeks ago after clearing it in advance with only 12 fellow Republicans, members of an ad hoc committee appointed by the Majority Leader.

That bill, which polls showed only 11 percent of the nation’s population favoring, would have ultimately knocked some 22 percent of current insured Americans out of coverage. The bill got nowhere, as a fair number of Senate Republicans refused to go lock-step with it. (Democrats were universally opposed to both it and any other arbitrary measure repealing the A.C.A.)

On Tuesday, no one knew what McConnell had in mind at the time of Long’s scheduled Rotary appearance in Memphis. It was thought that he might seek a vote merely to forward in discussion of an as-yet-unknown health-care measure, or perhaps he had a specific bill in mind to seek a vote for, or …

Long had to wing it in her luncheon remarks, although she made it clear that any of several possible directions that the Senate (and later the whole Congress) might take on health care were crucial to Tennessee’s medical future — and especially to TennCare, a jointly funded federal/state program that administers to fully 50 percent of the state’s population, including, as she put it, “pregnant women, children, parents of children, the elderly, and the disabled.” Several of the pending Congressional possibilities under consideration by the GOP-dominated Congress — including a bill already passed by the House of Representatives and whatever has thus far been proposed in the Senate — would effectively either scuttle Medicaid at some point in the not-too-far-off future or impose unsustainable costs on Tennessee’s TennCare version.

Asked what outcome her department sought from Tennessee Republican Senators Lamar Alexander (one of McConnell’s erstwhile ad hoc group) and Bob Corker, Long answered: “Flexibilty,” (a word with numerous implications under the circumstances, some of them ironic). In her competent, detailed way, she had managed to suggest that otherwise the state — and its large population dependent on TennCare  — would shortly be forced into a corner.

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Editorial Opinion

Remembering Leonard Gill

CREDIT: Leonard Gill

There is a sense in which the larger community of letters is a polity of sorts, or at the very least a spiritual institution that transcends particular parochial venues. So it is then that the unexpected passing of former Flyer writer and editor Leonard Gill this week is being mourned everywhere in Memphis and its environs that people are familiar with the work and the wide-ranging humanitarian concerns and the pure delight in language that were part and parcel of Leonard. In paying tribute to him, as we do here, leaning heavily below on words composed by his colleague Michael Finger, we are paying tribute to the best human traditions.

Leonard Gill

Born in Memphis on June 18, 1953, Leonard graduated from Christian Brothers High School and then Rhodes College, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and earned a master’s degree from Harvard University. During the summers, he studied at the University of Virginia and the University of Arizona.  He remained in Boston for several years after college, but returned home to teach art history at the Memphis College of Art and work at the old Round Table bookstore.

A lover of books and the written word, Leonard was best known as a longtime writer, copy editor, and book reviewer for the Memphis Flyer and Memphis magazine. It’s impossible to imagine him without books tucked under his arm, and in one of many tributes, a colleague remembered, “He could capture the feel of a book and its author like no other.” Another said, “Talking books with him was a reminder of how language is something to be loved.”

He could read people pretty well, too, and for the various literary sections published by the Flyer each year, which required guest reviews, Leonard had a special knack for perfectly matching books with the interests of the staff and freelancers he recruited.

News of his death spread quickly through the Memphis literary and journalism community, and reaction to the sad news carried a common thread. Friends and colleagues recalled him in this way: “the sweetest man,” “I loved Leonard, as I think everybody did,” “Leonard lifted those near him,” “always a gentleman,” “what a great guy and a great teacher,” “one of the best people,” “kind, witty, and insightful,” and “one of the most brilliant people I ever met.”

If Leonard were reading this, in his self-effacing way he would no doubt comment, “Oh, surely they are talking about somebody else.”

With his quiet, bashful demeanor, it’s not unkind to say that Leonard didn’t always stand out in a crowd. He wouldn’t have wanted to. But anyone who spoke with him, even briefly, soon learned this was a person they wanted, and needed, to know better. And for those lucky enough to call Leonard Gill a friend, they were better because of it.

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Editorial Opinion

A Call to Arms on Health Care

It was a heck of a party, jammed to the rafters and brimming with overflow energy. The only problem was that the chief invited guests were a no-show, though no one was much surprised by that.
We’re talking about last Saturday’s town hall on health care at the IBEW union hall on Madison, sponsored by a generous assortment of local organizations devoted to the subject and dedicated to the preservation of the Affordable Care Act, currently under threat of elimination by a GOP-dominated Congress and a fellow-traveling tag-along president.

In theory, Tennessee’s two Republican Senators, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker, both regarded as antagonistic toward the ACA (aka Obamacare) were to be the guests of honor, but, as was relayed with heavily underscored irony early on by co-host Mary Green of the progressive group Indivisible, both senators had responded that they had “schedules that would not allow them to come.”

That got an appropriate mix of groans, sardonic laughs, and boos from the audience, and the laughter got more uproarious when Green drew attention to the fact that Alexander and Corker, along with fellow Obamacare opponent David Kustoff, the GOP congressman from the 8th District, were all represented at the meeting by life-size cardboard cutouts that were “questioned,” mocked, and scolded in the course of the meeting.

Another Indivisible host, Emily Fulmer, noted the fact that passage of the pending Senate bill, disingenuously called the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA) would mean $880 billion in cuts for Medicaid, which in one form or another pays for the medical needs of 60 percent of the American population.

Aftyn Behn of the Tennessee Justice Center presented slides demonstrating, among other things, that BCRA would mean disastrous cutbacks for hospitals and programs designed to curb the current opioid epidemic. Tennessee, she observed, owned the dubious distinction of having the nation’s leading rate of hospital closures, “with more rural closures coming, including one in Blount County on Lamar Alexander Parkway.” That got the wry laugh it deserved.

Ashley Coffield of Planned Parenthood pointed out that the bill included a provision to “defund” her organization and prohibit women, children, and men from availing themselves of the wide range of “affordable, high quality, and non-judgmental health care” offered by Planned Parenthood.

Allison Donald of the Center for Independent Living and ADAPT, which sees to the needs of the disabled, saw services to these “most vulnerable” about to be disrupted. Physicians Art Sutherland and Tom Gettelfinger pointed out the ongoing hijacking of heath care by self-serving corporations and the outrageous spike in therapeutic drug prices. Essence Jackson of Sistercare proclaimed the obvious: “Health care is not a privilege; it’s a human right!” And Virgie Banks of the COPPER Coalition exhorted, “Keep the pressure on!” As she and the others noted, the BCRA will likely come to a vote the week of July 24th.

It would behoove all of us with a concern for the general health and welfare our citizenry to pay heed to what was said on Saturday.

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Editorial Opinion

Making Waves at Shelby County Commission

Changes in national government always cause adjustments on the part of local governments, in the same way that dropping a pebble on the surface of a settled body of water prompts ripples outward.

But the most recent change from the Democratic presidency of Obama to the Republican administration of Trump has generated more than the usual uncertainties in Memphis and Shelby County. The impact is more like that of a boulder being thrown into a bathtub.

One obvious case in point has been the continuing brouhaha over the effort by three local officials — Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, Sheriff Bill Oldham, and Juvenile Court Judge Dan Michael — to get the court out from under the direct supervision of the U.S. Department of Justice, as imposed by a 2012 Memorandum of Understanding between the DOJ and Shelby County government.

Most or all of these officials had a chance three weeks ago to buttonhole the current boss of the DOJ, Trump-appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, about ending his department’s hands-on monitoring of Juvenile Court, and a now-famous letter by the three to Sessions followed up on the matter. Predictably, there was great opposition to the request, which has dominated various local proceedings, including last week’s kickoff in Memphis of a statewide listening tour by the legislative Black Caucus.

The essential argument of those opposed to the Justice Department’s potential withdrawal of direct oversight is that sufficient remedies have not been provided to correct the irregularities pinpointed by a prior DOJ investigation of the court, including what the investigators saw as outright racial bias in processing of juvenile offenders.

As indicated in Politics (p. 8), the matter spilled over into this week’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission, which saw all six African-American Democrats and one supportive white Republican formally adopt a resolution opposing the withdrawal request — all this in the county mayor’s presence. Four of the commission’s Republicans demurred, but not by voting no; even they, reading the aroused reaction against the initiative on the part of several audience members, saw abstention from voting to be the better part of valor.

One of them, however, Millington Commissioner Terry Roland, cautioned, in essence, that the political views of Sessions, a conservative Republican, were liable to be significantly different from those of former Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder, the Democrat under whose tenure the MOU was authorized.

It is hard to imagine Luttrell et al. venturing to petition whatever attorney general might have been appointed by Clinton for a lifting of the MOU.

The root fact is that, in the absence of verifiable concrete data, Sessions is indeed likely to base his decision on subjective — which is to say political — interpretation of the evidence.

Whatever the attorney general does will make waves in the chambers of local government — just as Sessions’ promise of federal help to the understaffed Memphis Police Department has complicated the thinking of both city and county officials about how to remedy the MPD’s problems.

We imagine Sessions sees it all as a welcome break from the turmoil of the ongoing Russia investigations in Washington.

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Editorial Opinion

Go Ask Alice

The popular sense of the word “schizophrenia” is that it denotes a condition of split identity. Clinically, it is regarded with more complexity, as “a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.”

Either definition is a fairly apt description of the current political climate in Washington, D.C. How else can one explain the follow-up last week to seemingly heartfelt proclamations of fraternity and comity from Republican and Democratic leaders in the wake of a madman’s ambush of GOP members practicing for an annual charity baseball game? Even as GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic Minority Leader Charles Schumer stood side-by-side before the resultant game in their short sleeves pledging to maintain good relations and to drop the barriers to understanding, Schumer and other Democrats were begging in vain for a peek at the Obamacare replacement bill McConnell and a select group of other Republicans are writing in secret.

A week later, the Democrats still haven’t been afforded the merest glimpse of a measure that McConnell intends to bring to the floor for a vote before an even more revered annual circumstance, the 4th of July Congressional recess.

How’s that for comity and communication? Worsening the situation is the fact that, according to apparently reliable leaks from behind that curtain of secrecy, even President Trump, who is still desperately wanting to get something actually legislated during his tenure, has rebuked the would-be framers of the bill for fashioning something “mean” and has implored them to come up with something that has a “heart.” Maybe something, we’d like to think, that does not strip 23 million Americans of their health insurance in order to provide the wealthiest one percent of the country’s populace with $8 billion in tax cuts?

As for Trump himself, who — eyes glued to teleprompter — delivered his own eloquent appeal for unity on game night, he was back to sending out divisive tweets the very next morning, attacking figures in his own administration for daring to pursue their duty in connection with the Russia investigation that he obviously fears will implicate him.

And night after night on the cable news shows, anchors and reporters do battle with spinmeisters who are repeating the same old, same old — talking points that we’ve already heard too many times, and “logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead.”

How does the rest of that song go — “White Rabbit”?

“When the men on the chessboard get up and tell you where to go/

And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom, and your mind is moving low/ Go ask Alice, I think she’ll know …”

Better Alice than Sean Spicer or Sarah Huckabee Sanders. We’ve been paying attention long enough to know that “the white knight is talking backwards, and the red queen’s off with her head.”

So Alice will have to do, we suppose. What network does she work for?

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Editorial Opinion

Complicated Change

A snag developed Monday in the Shelby County Commission’s twin initiatives to increase the number of county contracts with locally owned small businesses (LOSB, in governmental shorthand) and with those owned by women or minority entrepreneurs (MWBE, for Minority and Women-Owned Business Enterprises).

A single contract dispute threatens both well-intentioned objectives. It involves the question of switching the management of some 65 people employed as security in courtrooms and other official county offices. These officials, who screen members of the public entering county facilities and perform other kinds of backup duty for the Sheriff’s Department, are currently working under the aegis of Allied Universal Security Services, a company with offices throughout the United States but headquartered either in California or in Pennsylvania — depending on varying accounts adduced by commissioners during Monday’s extended debate.

Responding to the aforesaid commission initiatives to achieve more diversity on the awarding of county contracts, a local company, Clarion Security, which is owned by a woman, aligned itself with four minority-owned partners and bid against Allied for the county security contract. As it happened, Allied had already been recontracted for the service, but in the wake of the new LOSB and MWBE criteria adopted after a commission-adopted disparity study, new criteria were imposed, and the contract had been re-bid.

Clarion was the winner the second time around, but there were objections about the fairness of having a rebidding process from some commissioners, who also harbored doubts as to whether the employees now working for Allied would be rehired by Clarion with the same benefits as before. Principal objectors to the Clarion contract award were Commissioners Terry Roland and Walter Bailey, who, in committee meetings last week as well as in Monday’s commission meeting, raised enough uncertainty among their fellow commissioners to secure a narrow 7-6 vote referring the matter back to committee for another round of study and debate.

That will happen Wednesday, and expectations are that the award will ultimately be made to Clarion during the next regular commission meeting on Monday, June 26th, inasmuch as the local company seems to be making a serious and good-faith effort to provide the required assurances.

Maybe so, maybe no. But the whole flap underscores the difficulties inherent in making sweeping changes in long-established governmental procedures. Resolution of the current case will provide a true test case of the commission’s ability to do so.

Chris Owens

All of us at the Flyer were shocked and saddened to learn of the sudden death of our former advertising director, Chris Owens, who was killed in a freak accident on the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, Monday. Chris was a warm, funny, wonderful guy who had many friends here at the Flyer and all over Memphis. Our deepest sympathies go to his family and his many friends who loved him. He was taken from us way too soon, and we will miss him.

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Editorial Opinion

Heavy Weather: The Politics of Climate Change

There is a serious argument to be made that the most important recent development on the national political scene is not the ongoing and inexorable rush to judgment on the troubling Russophilic foibles of President Donald J. Trump, a Barnum-

like figure who seems more and more out of his element, even dangerously so. That would be the alarming decision by Trump to remove the United States from the common-sense Paris Accord pledging the nations of the Earth to work together on a means to combat the unmistakable menace of climate change.

Trump’s decision puts the United States, formerly something of a leader on the environmental front, in the unaccustomed position of an international outlier — at variance not only with scientific consensus but with world opinion. As such, it is as much a scandal and embarrassment as is his cavalier disregard of the nation’s long-established NATO alliance. The president’s decision to jettison such environmental safeguards as currently exist (backed by his scofflaw appointee as EPA head Scott Pruitt) constitutes an immediate threat to public safety, which is more consistently threatened these days by unpredictable phenomena from the natural world than it is by ISIS, al Qaeda, Vladimir Putin, and all the country’s other potential political and military enemies rolled into one.

Memphians in particular have spent much of the last 10 days coping with the loss of power coming from the latest in what, in a very short number of years, has been a series of freak weather events. The swirling winds and seeming nonstop rainstorms of the weekend before last closely resembled, both in their severity and in the damage wreaked, the severe weather disturbance that, a decade or so back, we locals dubbed “Hurricane Elvis.” Just a tad further back than that was an ice storm that immobilized transportation, caused fatalities, and knocked out power on a scale comparable to the other mentioned events.

Beyond that, we residents of the Mississippi Delta area have learned to cope with frequent tornado watches and warnings and with the real thing itself — like the lethal one of the mid-’90s that laid waste to portions of Germantown — and with several successor tornados of similar intensity.

We’re talking about lives lost and endangered, billions of dollars in damages, nationwide, setbacks in urban progress, and, not least, the “fear itself” that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once declared to be our worst and most crippling adversary.

That was a time, of course, when the leader of the nation could be trusted to deal truthfully and responsibility with reality. Virtually all the previous 44 presidents fell into that category. Now, we ended up with one who distrusts not only the consensus of the scientific community but, it would seem, truth itself.

There has to be a way out of this predicament. Hopefully, the voices which assured us at the resolution of the Watergate crisis that “the system worked” will be able to say that again. But it remains to be seen.

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Editorial Opinion

Arkansas Goes to Pot

On November 8, 2016, 53 percent of Arkansas voters approved Issue 6, a medical marijuana initiative. The Arkansas Medical Marijuana Amendment enables Arkansans to use and safely obtain medical marijuana with their doctors’ approval. The amendment establishes between four and eight cultivation facility licenses and up to 40 dispensaries statewide, all regulated by the Alcoholic Beverage Control Division.

In the recently completed 2017 legislative session, several changes were made to the original initiative, including a 60-day delay from the original law’s June 1st start date for when patients can begin applying for ID cards and a 30-day delay for when businesses can apply for dispensary licenses. The delays are expected to push the start date for when marijuana can begin to be prescribed into the fall of 2017.

The legislature also enacted a change in the law that is designed to increase doctors’ participation. Physicians will not have to certify that the benefits of medical cannabis outweigh the potential harm to patient. Under the amendment, Arkansas doctors can now simply certify any patient for the program if they confirm he or she has a legitimate qualifying condition.

Those conditions include: cancer, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis C, ALS, Tourette’s syndrome, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, PTSD, severe arthritis, fibromyalgia, Alzheimer’s disease, or the treatment of any of these conditions. In addition, patients with doctors’ certifications qualify if they have a chronic or debilitating medical condition (or its treatment) that produces cachexia or wasting syndrome, peripheral neuropathy, intractable pain that has not responded to other treatment for at least six months, severe nausea, seizures, and severe or persistent muscle spasms. The Arkansas Department of Health has the authority to approve new qualifying conditions.

Registration fees, paid to the health department, will be required of patients, caregivers, and cannabis facilities. Cannabis will also be subject to all existing sales taxes, the revenue from which will be distributed to the health department, the Alcoholic Beverage Control Administration Division, the newly established Medical Marijuana Commission, the Skill Development Fund, and to vocational and technical training. Any leftover funds will be used to provide cannabis on a sliding scale to patients who are unable to afford a sufficient supply.

It will still be illegal to use marijuana in various locations, including schools, daycare centers, correctional facilities, and other public spaces. It will also still be illegal to operate a vehicle under the influence of pot. Cities and counties also may pass reasonable zoning restrictions for dispensaries and growing facilities. In fact, local entities can even prohibit such facilities via a popular vote.

But … it is happening. Marijuana is going to become legal in Arkansas this fall, right across the Mississippi River from the Bluff City. The Natural State will begin immediately reaping the financial benefits and increased tax revenues of a sane (and inevitable) marijuana policy, much to detriment of Tennessee, which remains mired in the past, wasting millions of dollars prosecuting and imprisoning folks for what is, at worst, a victimless crime — and, at best, a useful medical treatment for millions.

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Remembering Irvin Salky: One of a Kind

There will be — indeed, there already have been — major statesmen, captains of industry, stars of stage and screen, inventors, wizards, and saints who come and go in this world without leaving the kind of imprint on their environment and on humankind that Irvin Salky did.

Irvin Salky

The diminutive 75-year-old genie — a Memphian first, last, and always — did not invent the art of friendship, nor distill the essence of cool, nor perfect the nature of service, but he mastered all these arts and did as much as any individual person could to help his often uncertain native city find its heart and discern those of its attributes that could appeal to, fascinate, and even ennoble the rest of the world. In 1977, Salky both founded and funded the Beale Street Music Festival, for decades now a celebration of the city’s own great musical history, an exposition of state-of-the-art musical forms from all over, a model for other cities, and, not least, a grand good time, a great party.

Irv Salky served his community as a resident conscience of sorts, though he was never pompous or pious or didactic about it. In the mid-1960s, he was an early member of the city’s first fully integrated law firm — Ratner, Sugarmon, Lucas, Willis and Caldwell — which pursued civil rights causes and civil liberties issues that other firms were loath to touch. Cases in point included defending the Invaders, a black militant group that some blamed for street violence during the fateful sanitation strike of 1968, and Georgina Spelvin, the star of the sexually explicit 1973 film, The Devil in Miss Jones.

Salky’s spirit and energy belied his undersized and increasingly frail physique. He lost part of a lung years ago because of what may have been a medical misdiagnosis and later would lose the rest of that lung to cancer. As with the human rights matters that moved him, he fought his health issues hard in these last several weeks, but the combined effects of a stroke and a bout of pneumonia finally proved too much for him.

Salky’s circle of friends was extensive, including movie stars, musicians, and major politicians — none closer than 9th District congressman Steve Cohen, for whom Salky, his elder by several years, was something of a beacon.

“A great friend and mentor to me and many, many others,” said Cohen in a Facebook post Thursday that, for many of us, was our first news about Irv’s passing. Cohen would have much to say about his friend then and in the days after that, including an eloquent and heartfelt eulogy before a large and diverse crowd on the occasion of Salky’s funeral Monday at Baron Hirsch Cemetery.

But it is hard to improve on these words from the congressman’s Thursday night Facebook post: “Irvin was law, civil rights, music, jazz, sports, cool hats, sartorial style, classic aged cars, and Midtown. He was a Navy vet, a Vandy law and Memphis State grad, the guardian and manager of Phineas Newborn, Furry Lewis, and Memphis Slim among others, the founder of the Beale Street Music Festival, and the superb lawyer for so many. He loved Memphis, his partners at the Russell Sugarmon law firm, and really everyone he came in contact with. No more friendly or kind a person has Memphis known.”

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Editorial Opinion

The Russians and Hacking the Vote

There was some familiar fallout from this week’s special hearing of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee at which former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates testified about her repeated warnings early this year to the White House about the compromised position of then National Security Adviser Michael T. Flynn vis-à-vis his relations with Russia. The major fallout from that reminder is, of course, that a larger Congressional investigation into possible collusion between the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government remains inevitable.

A secondary point emerged in one or two of the extended TV pundit-fests that followed the session. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, under grilling from CNN’s Anderson Cooper, touched upon it fairly boldly, leaping from the macro subjects of Flynn’s tomfoolery and last year’s Russian skullduggery to the micro-subject of potential ballot tampering by Russia or some other foreign adversary the next time there’s a major national election in this country.

As Woolsey pointed out to Cooper, 25 percent of the election machines in this country “have no paper” and therefore no paper trail, and consequently, in the absence of such black-and-white print-out evidence capable of countering an electronically forged vote total, are wide open to hacking. There has been an extraordinary amount of self-satisfied relief expressed on both sides of the partisan line in Washington concerning the fact that, while there is ample evidence that the Russians looked into skewing our voting-machine results, there is no evidence indicating that they succeeded.

Not this time, maybe. But the important fact is that they tried. Maybe by 2020, or even 2018, they’ll figure out how to do it. And then, as former director Woolsey was at such pains to point out, we’ll really be in trouble.
Here in Shelby County, we have had our share of equally farsighted (but so far disregarded) prophets on this vital point. University of Memphis assistant law dean and former County Commissioner Steve Mulroy tirelessly evangelized for paper-trail voting machines for years, and Joe Weinberg, a dedicated watchdog on the activities (and inactions) of the Shelby County Election Commission for much of the last decadde, has persistently warned of the vulernabilities of our current electronic voting machines.

We can debate the relative degree of success enjoyed by the Russians in their assault on our presidential election process in 2016. They may or may not have tilted the election in the direction of the eventual winner, Donald Trump. But last year’s was but a trial run of sorts, and the next time out, Russia or North Korea or some other mischief-making adversary may have the process down cold.

It is painful to remember that in 2008 the Tennessee General Assembly actually obtained federal funding for making the state’s electronic voting machines paper-trail capable, but in subsequent years an emergent Republican majority took steps to redirect those funds into a propaganda fund on behalf of what became the state’s current useless and even insidious Photo-ID law. That was another electoral misfortune in which the word “hack” (in one of its other meanings) played a significant part.