Watch now: Racine’s lofty goal for a neighborhood-focused health clinic hangs in the balance | Government and Politics

The city says that $53 million would complete the funding needed to build such a facility.

But Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature have vehemently opposed the expansion of Medicaid, characterizing it as a slippery way to increase taxes in the aggregate that they claim won’t be worth the bonus now.

“We have people covered already. To take the expansion money, that makes us a servant of the federal government even more,” state Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, said in an interview last week. “That expense is going to be forced onto the local government and the state government.”

On Wednesday, Evers signed an executive order requiring the Legislature to convene on Tuesday, May 25, to discuss the Medicaid expansion and accompanying spending plan. Republicans responded hours later, vowing to immediately “gavel out this unserious stunt” when Tuesday comes.

Republican leaders wrote in a joint statement: “If the Governor were serious about the proposals he packed into this bill, he could fund each one of them today with the mountain of federal funds at his direct disposal.”

The proposed expansion of BadgerCare to another 90,000 or so Wisconsinites, Wanggaard and his fellow Republicans have argued, isn’t as good as Democrats make it sound, since those 90,000 people likely already have access to heavily subsidized health care coverage.