Will Senate Republicans have a voting record in favor of Obamacare expansion and against President Trump’s education agenda when session ends?

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• Republican Senators looking to buck President Trump’s school choice agenda may face the uncomfortable reality that they sided with President Obama on Medicaid expansion, but against the head of their own Party when it came to giving families education options.

In a poignant scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Vito Corleone stands before the bosses of the other New York crime families and offers forgiveness for past offenses — offenses that included the killing of his eldest son and his own attempted murder. He explains his willingness to let the past go is selfish. He wants to bring his son Michael home from Sicily without harm coming to him:

“But I’m a superstitious man and if some unlucky accident should befall him, if he should get shot in the head by a police officer or if he should hang himself in his jail cell, or if he’s struck by a bolt of lightning then, I’m going to blame some of the people in this room. And that, I will not forgive.”

Two years ago, both the Mississippi House and Mississippi Senate proposed different plans to implement Obamacare expansion. Governor Tate Reeves stood stalwartly against it and ultimately the chambers were unable to agree to a proposal. The effort fizzled and has not been revived. It seems there is little appetite for it, and perhaps even recognition, in certain corners, that the policy climate makes it even less attractive today.

For conservatives, like myself, swallowing full Medicaid expansion was a hard pill. The conservative movement had spent more than a decade pushing back on President Obama’s signature legislation, and there is substantial data about its excessive costs and lackluster efficacy at this point. Still, most of us were willing to be like Vito. We’d overlook that attempt if we could get back to core conservative principles guiding the Legislature.

“School Choice is Michael Corleone, Kill It and Vito Might Go Medieval”

A push for universal school choice will likely dominate conversation leading up to and during the 2026 legislative session. Giving parents more control over the education of their children is fundamentally conservative. Recognizing the power of competition and choice is fundamentally conservative.

All signs point to the fact that House leadership gets that. Governor Reeves certainly gets it. It’s less clear if Lt. Governor Delbert Hosemann and his membership get it. Every indicator is that the Senate chamber could be the bump in the road — the hand that tells President Trump to go jump in the Gulf of America.

Also unclear, is whether they realize how such obstinance, combined with their former willingness to side with President Obama on Medicaid expansion, might be perceived in an R +40 district. 20 Republican Senators voted for expansion. They were joined by all of the Democrats in the chamber.

One can justify the Obamacare vote, perhaps, by saying the Senate version wasn’t as aggressive, and it wasn’t. And one can overlook the vote as an aberrant, one-off deviation from conservative orthodoxy — a pragmatic choice. (Though Republicans in Mississippi and in other places have certainly lost their seats after voting for Medicaid expansion, and if you’re explaining in politics, you’re losing).

But two such deviations start to look like something more. Like a trend that is anything but conservative and maybe even more than a touch liberal.

School choice is Michael Corleone. Kill it, and there could be real consequence.

It’s not that hard to imagine what a conservative competitor’s mail would look like in a deep red district: “Senator such-and-such claims he’s conservative, but do you know he said ‘yes’ to Obama and ‘no’ to Trump.” (Insert scary pictures). One shudders to think.

Vito Corleone told his fellow mobsters he was willing to let one set of offenses slide, but wouldn’t stomach another. It will be interesting to see, for those who test the resolve of conservative voters, whether a vote against President Trump’s school choice agenda — on top of embracing Obamacare expansion — will be an offense they do not forgive.