Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens is partisan without wanting to appear partisan

Missouri faces a budget shortfall, and the state’s new governor wants people to believe Republicans had nothing to do with it.

The Missouri governor is responsible for making midyear budget cuts. Gov. Eric Greitens on Tuesday announced a $146.4 million reduction in new or increased spending. In a similar budget-balancing move, former Gov. Jay Nixon made $115.5 million in cuts last July.

What’s striking is how differently Nixon, a Democrat, and Greitens, a Republican, framed the discussion.

In announcing the cuts last summer, Nixon said the spending reductions were necessary because of “less-than-projected revenue growth.” Nixon identified a culprit, noting that corporate income taxes had decreased by 35 percent from the previous year.

But now that a Republican is the governor, the state’s budget problems are to be blamed on something else entirely.

At the top of his remarks about the spending reductions he’s ordered, Greitens says Missouri is being drained by “special interest tax credits and the faster-than-projected growth in healthcare expenditures, driven in part by the national impact of Obamacare.”

Obamacare, which Greitens campaigned against, seems like a strange place to point blame. Missouri, after all, chose not to expand Medicaid under the terms of the Affordable Care Act. States that refused expansion have seen their Medicaid numbers rise. But at last report, Missouri had not experienced much of a “woodwork effect,” as it’s known. (Related: Republican-led states that did expand Medicaid, like Michigan and Ohio, feel pretty good about the decision.)

Greitens is also trying to kick dirt at Nixon, calling the budget a “dismal situation inherited from the previous administration,” as if the Republican-controlled Legislature had no say in the matter. The governor makes recommendations, but lawmakers actually craft the budget, as they’ll be happy to tell you.

In fact, lawmakers are mainly responsible for the decrease in corporate tax collections that Nixon complained about last summer. This week, the Missouri Budget Project released a report indicating that corporate tax collections fell by $155 million in 2016, after the Legislature changed the way some companies calculate their taxes. The report describes the tax cut as “permanent and substantial.”

Nixon, it should be noted, also pressed lawmakers to slash the state’s tax credit programs, which Greitens acknowledges are a problem. But, again, Republicans receive none of the blame — it’s those darn special interests!

Greitens wants people to believe he’s above politics. “There’s no monopoly on wisdom, and I certainly don’t have it,” he told KSHB-TV this week. But the early signs suggest that he is going to govern like any run-of-the-mill Republican.