Back a few years when Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was a fresh new face on the scene he was thought to be a really bright guy, a comer, a pol on the rise in the Republican ranks. Since then he’s presented a State of the Union response which was universally panned. He’s generally been a noisy gadfly occasionally, but he hasn’t been taken very seriously, except as yet another right-wing Governor who’s tried very hard to eviscerate teachers unions and public schools in general.

He hasn’t redeemed himself with his latest appearance on the national stage.

MoveOn.org has put up a billboard asking Jindal why he won’t expand Medicaid to help about 242,000 of his state’s poorest citizens, and Jindal has responded by suing MoveOn. Part of his rhetorical attacks on the group include the claim that the Affordable Care Act “prioritizes coverage of childless adults ahead of the most vulnerable,” which he wrote in an op-ed for the Shreveport Times last week.

Except that, as we’ve come to expect from Governor Jindal, he’s wrong.

• First, some disabled people could actually qualify for health coverage under the Medicaid expansion, according to MaryBeth Musumeci, associate director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.
• Second, Obamacare should have no policy bearing on the traditional Medicaid program. Federal funding for the traditionally eligible population remains exactly the same, and the states retain the same flexibility to manage their programs as existed prior to the law.
• Third, and perhaps most devastatingly to Jindal’s theory, Obamacare actually expands programs and funding for so-called “long-term services and supports” under Medicaid — the kind of long-term care that the disabled would utilize.

Essentially, Governor Jindal has shown himself to be a man who is careless with facts and prone to shooting off his mouth (or word processor) without thinking about the consequences.

To think he was once thought to be on the fast track for the Republican nomination for President in 2012!