Montini: Robin Hood in Reverse is foiled...for now.

Robin Hood in Reverse (the Goldwater Institute) has been thwarted temporarily in its ongoing attempt to use funding from the rich to take from the poor.

This time, Superior Court Judge Douglas Gerlach ruled that Arizona’s Medicaid Expansion is not illegal, meaning that thousands of our brothers and sisters won’t lose their health care.

The expansion, you may remember, was approved by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans at the Legislature that was cobbled together by former Gov. Jan Brewer.

Many of her fellow Republicans disagreed.

In fact, 36 Republican lawmakers decided to file a lawsuit to stop the expansion, something the Goldwater Institute (whose lawyers probably don’t fret much over health care coverage) was happy to oblige.

The expansion is mostly funded by the federal government, providing thousands of Arizonans with health care for the first time and reducing the enormous burden on hospitals, which must deal with the uninsured in their emergency rooms. There is a local match in funding from an assessment paid by Arizona hospitals. The disgruntled lawmakers allege that the assessment is a tax, which can only be approved by a two-thirds supermajority of the Legislature. The bill passed with a majority.

But for now the judge said that the fee “does not qualify as a tax.”

Of course, all of this will go to the next step in the appeals process and wind up eventually at the Arizona Supreme Court.

The Goldwater folks have many golden arrows remaining in their quiver. And our litigious legislators? Well, they have no worries.

They’re not spending their money on the lawsuit. And as The Arizona Republic’s Ken Alltucker reported earlier this year, two-thirds of the Republican lawmakers who sued to overturn Medicaid coverage are on state-sponsored health-insurance plans. Meaning they use taxpayer money to get better medical benefits than most average Arizona taxpayers.

Attorney Tim Hogan of the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest, which represents four Medicaid recipients who have intervened in the lawsuit, told The Republic, "It is easy for legislators to vote to deny benefits and health care to others when it's not going to affect them. They are on the state plan at taxpayer expense, so they are all set."

Of course, the Goldwater lawyers argue that this isn’t about kicking needy people off health care but about bigger issues. Christina Sandefur, a Goldwater Institute attorney who is representing the legislators, described Medicaid expansion as an "unconstitutional tax."

The institute proudly proclaims that it protects taxpayers.

That's true, I suppose, but which taxpayers? And protects them from whom?

Goldwater lawyers accuse our police and firefighters of "looting" taxpayers. They say that we are being “scammed” by “government unions” that represent first responders and some of our other friends and neighbors. And they want to kick needy people off health care.

So I guess the institute's claim is true, in a way. Arizona's Robin Hood in Reverse “protects” the state's most wealthy, most generous (to the Goldwater Institute) taxpayers... from the rest of us.