Expanding Equality or Redefining Citizenship?

A Critical Analysis of Minnesota's SF 4778 and the Moral Logic of the Progressive Left

Policy Overview: SF 4778

On May 15, 2025, SF 4778—a bill proposing the expansion of MinnesotaCare into a state-funded public option—was effectively derailed by Republicans in the Minnesota legislature. The bill would have broadened health coverage to include a larger swath of Minnesotans, explicitly extending eligibility to “undocumented noncitizens.”¹

Section 23, Subdivision 1 of the bill references an existing statute: Minnesota Statutes §256L: 04, Subdivision 10. Because undocumented immigrants are excluded from federal programs like Medicaid, this statute allows Minnesota residents who meet income and residency requirements to access MinnesotaCare using state funds. However, rather than quietly maintaining this policy, SF 4778 sought to formally embed undocumented eligibility into the state’s public option structure. In effect, the bill would have transformed a quiet exception into a permanent feature of the healthcare system.

This move sparked significant opposition from Minnesota Republicans. The proposed expansion was seen as diverting public funds from legal residents already struggling within an overstretched healthcare system.

These objections are not merely ideological. California has implemented similar policies and is now grappling with the fiscal consequences. A May 14, 2025, article in the Los Angeles Times reported that Governor Newsom may freeze enrollment for undocumented residents due to budget shortfalls. The state is now reckoning with the real costs of its political commitments.

Yet at a May 15 press conference, Minnesota Democratic State Senator Alice Mann insisted that the bill’s failure came down to Republican cruelty:

[Democrats] couldn’t negotiate with a party [Republicans] who does not care about the wellbeing of people." "Taking away people’s healthcare was their number one priority.

In her telling, the collapse had nothing to do with an effort to enshrine de facto legal status through healthcare eligibility. It wasn’t an attempt to reframe citizenship, sidestep federal immigration law, or extend taxpayer-funded benefits to those not legally recognized by the state. No—the real reason, we’re told, is that Republicans don’t care about people.

Before analyzing the rhetoric behind that statement, and others by Senator Mann—and the linguistic maneuvers it relies on, many of which reflect a kind of moralistic overreach—it’s worth first laying out the bill’s legal and policy context.

Clarifying the Legal Context

To be clear: Minnesota’s proposed expansion is not illegal. States can use their funds to provide healthcare to undocumented immigrants under statutes such as Minnesota §256L: 04, Subdivision 10. SF 4778 complies with federal law by ensuring undocumented coverage is funded entirely by state dollars.

However, legality does not resolve the deeper issue of governance. Minnesota is not a sovereign entity. It is a member of a federal union governed by national immigration law. When a state offers expansive, taxpayer-funded benefits to individuals not lawfully permitted to reside or work in the U.S., it sends a conflicting signal: state norms can override national standards.

This kind of policy doesn’t exist in isolation; it fractures the shared legal framework that binds states to a coherent federal immigration system. The result is a mismatch of signals and obligations: increased migration pressure and growing costs for states without federal support. That may be legal, but it erodes the coherence that makes federal immigration law enforceable.

The Ideological Framework

Political actors often contort language to obscure reality. The progressive Left, in particular, has developed a rhetorical style that cloaks ideology in the language of “compassion,” “justice,” and “progress.” Over the years, scholars and commentators have unpacked this framework under various names: Identity Politics, Wokeism, and Critical Social Justice. What we see in Minnesota is not just a local policy dispute; it’s a revealing case study of these deeper philosophical instincts at work.

However, we need to step back to understand this phenomenon more fully. The broader context is the modern Left’s rejection- or perhaps fundamental misunderstanding- of Classical Liberalism. From this point forward, when I refer to “the Left” or “Progressives,” I use the terms interchangeably. When I use the word “Liberal,” I mean something distinct: the Classical Liberal tradition rooted in individual rights, limited government, and legal neutrality. This tradition, which John Locke articulated in his Second Treatise of Government (1689), sees government not as an engine for social equality but as a protector of pre-political rights, especially life, liberty, and property. For Locke, property was not a source of social corruption but the natural fruit of labor, central to individual freedom. These principles would profoundly shape the American founding and starkly contrast with the modern egalitarian frameworks that demand redistribution or social reordering.

Distributive egalitarianism seeks to equalize outcomes by redistributing resources, wealth, services, and access. Relational egalitarianism emphasizes the need for social relations to be free from domination, hierarchy, or perceived moral inequality. While both frameworks claim to uphold human dignity, they often require coercive institutional interventions.

This shift marks a decisive break from the classical liberal tradition, in which law constrains justice and liberty, which are defined by limits on state power. The modern egalitarian vision reimagines justice as a top-down project of moral engineering that often reframes legal distinctions as morally insufficient and treats dissent not merely as disagreement, but as a denial of dignity. Nowhere is this more apparent than relational egalitarianism, which views society primarily through structural power differentials and informal hierarchies of respect. In this view, those who excel in social or economic life are presumed to be dominant, and therefore complicit in a system of oppression that disadvantages those without equal power. This logic invokes a similar structure to Karl Marx’s concept of class consciousness—the idea that the working class must awaken to their structural subordination within capitalist systems and organize in opposition. While Classical Liberalism seeks to protect individual rights and ensure formal equality under the law, relational egalitarianism demands a deeper, more invasive form of justice that enforces social and symbolic equality through institutional mechanisms.

Where Classical Liberalism is grounded in non-interference and legal neutrality, relational egalitarianism actively endorses state and institutional intervention, from the highest levels of law to the most intimate spaces of daily life. It inserts itself into how individuals relate to one another, how they speak, perceive, and even emote. In doing so, it abandons the liberal principles of autonomy and limited government in favor of a regulatory ethic that treats natural and social asymmetries—such as sex differences, cultural variation, or disparate group outcomes—not as realities to be understood or tolerated, but as moral wrongs to be corrected.

In this mode, justice is no longer pursued through law but through alignment with the prevailing moral sentiment. And once that sentiment becomes policy, it no longer inspires—it obligates. Programs to correct inequality become instruments of moral enforcement rather than civic reform. This can include state-funded benefits for individuals not legally recognized by federal immigration law (e.g., illegal immigrants), or institutional obligations imposed under Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) frameworks aimed at artificially rebalancing social hierarchies. In both cases, the burden of “justice” is redistributed, not as a matter of aspiration, but as a compulsory duty enforced by the state.

This moral architecture didn't emerge in a vacuum. It draws from a philosophical tradition that views social disparities not as reflections of individual difference or liberty, but as consequences of unjust systems. Eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (1755), presents a thought experiment of a pre-social state where humans lived in rough equality—a hypothetical scenario, not a historical claim—with no individual's strength, intelligence, or circumstance justifying domination. In this view, civil society—and especially the establishment of private property—marked the fall into inequality, giving rise to structural hierarchies that would require correction. While not grounded in empirical science, this vision laid the foundation for modern egalitarian frameworks that treat social difference not as inevitable, but as morally suspect— and thus something to be actively dismantled, in stark contrast to Locke’s view of property and social structure as essential to liberty and civic order.

This is how we arrive at movements that aim their arrows toward justice but often trade substance for symbolism. Slogans like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo—while rooted in real grievances—have, in many circles, evolved into shorthand for moral allegiance rather than calls for specific legal reform. In these contexts, the slogans function less as pathways to justice than as performative markers of ideological purity—litmus tests for group belonging. And in the spaces where that transformation occurs, the narrative itself is often commandeered by ideological activists and institutional actors who shape the discourse around symbolic allegiance. The original intent is sidelined, and public discourse shifts from institutional accountability to symbolic conformity. Under this model, justice becomes less a matter of institutional process than of moral posture—measured not by outcomes or legality, but by alignment with dominant narratives of virtue.

Language, too, plays a critical role in this ideological architecture. The progressive Left has strategically replaced the term “illegal immigrant” with softened alternatives like “undocumented” or “non-citizen.” These labels blur the moral and legal distinctions embedded in immigration law. By calling someone “undocumented,” the implication is that their status is a temporary bureaucratic hiccup—something done to them, rather than a result of voluntary unlawful entry or overstay. It reframes legal violation as administrative misclassification and subtly invites the presumption that normalization is only a matter of time. This rhetorical maneuver is not accidental: it aligns with the logic of the bill itself, which treats the presence of undocumented individuals as an eligibility issue to be solved, not a legal boundary to be respected. In this framing, those violating federal law are repositioned not as lawbreakers, but as invisible persons waiting to be seen—victims of an unresponsive system rather than agents with civic obligations.

Rhetorical Breakdown – The Press Conference

Returning to the May 15 press conference, Minnesota State Senator Alice Mann, one of the bill’s leading Democratic proponents, offered a series of remarks that exemplify the rhetorical strategies often used to moralize policy disagreement and foreclose debate.

[Democrats] couldn’t negotiate with a party [Republicans] who does not care about the wellbeing of people,” she said. “Taking away people’s healthcare was their number one priority.

This is a classic appeal to emotion. It paints Republicans as villains, removing access, rather than as opponents of a bill they saw as fiscally irresponsible or legally incoherent. It also employs a straw man, reducing complex objections to a caricatured desire to harm. The framing is morally absolutist, leaving no room for legitimate disagreement—it asserts that concern for budgetary limits or legal precedent is equivalent to cruelty. Worse still, it projects intent, suggesting that the goal was to cause harm, not avoid risk. It also rewrites the legislative timeline entirely: Democrats introduced a controversial bill they knew would face resistance, and when it failed, they framed it as Republican malice. That’s blame-shifting, plain and simple.

When we take away people’s healthcare, they end up in the ER… it makes our healthcare system weaker … of course, families fall into poverty.

Yes, emergency room overflow is a genuine concern—but that’s precisely the kind of downstream strain this policy was likely to produce. What’s presented here as the moral cost of Republican resistance is, in fact, a distraction from the policy’s own structural flaws. Suppose Democrats had taken lessons from states like California, where similar programs have stretched resources thin. In that case, they might have anticipated that including undocumented individuals in an already overburdened system could worsen outcomes, not improve them. ER strain, staff shortages, and broader systemic pressure were not unforeseen side effects. They were plausible, even likely, consequences of a bill that offered expanded access without expanded infrastructure.

[This was] all for political gain. To say that we protected, essentially, ‘homegrown Minnesotans’… [and that] people who look different… we do not care about them.

This is the Left’s go-to move: racialize opposition. If you dissent, it must be because you hate the “other.” The tactic converts policy disagreement into social sin. Once your critics are labeled bigots, there’s no room left for structural debate. This speaks to something fundamentally psychopathological, specific to the progressive left—an issue I’ll explore more fully in a future article.

Every person who lives in Minnesota is a Minnesota resident.

This is a linguistic sleight of hand. She employs the word “residency” to mean mere physical presence, sidestepping the legal distinction between resident and citizen. Under U.S. immigration law, undocumented individuals are not lawful residents. They are present without legal status. While many work, pay taxes, and contribute to their communities, as Senator Mann later points out, those contributions do not automatically confer identical benefits under the law.

Framing this as a matter of compassion obscures the legal reality. There is a difference between cruelty and governance. The former is a moral charge, while the latter is a civic duty grounded in law.

Reclaiming Civic Clarity

One major reason the Left has lost the plot is what can only be described as compassion inebriation—a moral intoxication that dulls foresight, substitutes sentiment for structure, elevates narcissistic moral grandstanding, and reflects a low-resolution understanding of the United States. And in some cases, this isn’t mere confusion—it’s manipulation. Some actors strategically exploit moral language for political or personal gain, disguising ambition as altruism. This distortion of moral concern—whether sincere or strategic—yields policies that flatten legal distinctions and erode civic coherence. To offer the same benefits to those here illegally as to those who abide by the law is to render the law meaningless.

One reason many Americans are growing disillusioned is that, at root, these ideas are not just misguided—they are fundamentally illiberal. Finding crafty ways to subvert federal law is not progress. It is a quiet dismantling of the legal and constitutional framework we are meant to uphold.

Regardless of background, Americans must stand up to the chaotic fragmentation of our national identity, the absolutism, and the moral grandstanding of political actors who weaponize our legislative structure to erode it from within. That means voting them out and speaking up. Let them know you’re no longer afraid of failing their moral litmus tests.

1. Note: Throughout this piece, I occasionally use the term “undocumented” when referring to individuals in the U.S. without legal authorization. This choice reflects the language used in SF 4778 itself, which avoids the legal clarity of “illegal immigrant” in favor of a more morally neutral and bureaucratic term. My use here is not an endorsement of that framing, but an intentional effort to underscore how the Left employs such language to obscure legal boundaries and recast immigration status as a matter of procedural delay rather than legal violation.