“Taking Food Out Of The Mouths Of Babes”: Food Stamps Work, So Why Are We Cutting Them?
Can I tell you a real success story? One we should all be proud of? Great, here goes: The program formerly known as food stamps has kept hunger from exploding along with the number of Americans living in poverty.
“That food insecurity hasn’t increased” since the financial meltdown in 2008, said David Beckmann, president of the Christian anti-hunger group Bread for the World, “is a tremendous testament to the power of SNAP,” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that replaced food stamps.
That does not mean that every child in this rich country of ours has enough to eat. On the contrary, Eli Saslow’s recent Post piece on a summer bread bus that takes lunch to kids in rural Tennessee was like something straight out of Angela’s Ashes. The 7-year-old who saves the juice from his fruit cup to feed to his baby sister reminded me of Frank McCourt and his classmates drooling for the apple peels their teacher tossed into the garbage in Limerick in the 1930s.
But government spending has kept the bottom from falling out: “What I see every day is how much food stamp programs mean to people on the edge,” said Monsignor John Enzler, president of Catholic Charities for the Archdiocese of Washington. “I tried to live on what food stamps give you for a week last year and I couldn’t do it, but it does make enough of a difference to allow people to stay in their apartments, and pay medical expenses and take care of their children.”
In a still sluggish economy — and compared to the alternative — isn’t that an outcome we should count as a win? You’d think so. Yet on Thursday, the Republican-controlled House passed a farm bill without the nutrition programs normally funded through that legislation.
Why? Well, as Republicans themselves explained on the House floor, it’s because so many on their side of the aisle felt that the $20.5 billion in cuts to food programs in the version of the farm bill that failed last month just weren’t deep enough. “Oh my goodness,” Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas said some colleagues asked him, “why couldn’t you do more?”
Oh my goodness, why should poor kids get to eat free?
Funding such programs through the farm bill “doesn’t serve the needs” of the poor, insisted Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.), a fourth-generation farmer who called the bill that passed “the next logical step on the path to real reform.”
If you’re serious about cutting government, Lucas urged members, then vote for the bill. Some conservative groups, meanwhile, opposed it for not going far enough in that regard. (Remember when George W. Bush said he wouldn’t balance his budget on the backs of the poor? His party doesn’t seem to.)
Responding to poverty by paring back nutrition programs is like answering a rise in diabetes by slashing insulin production. And as Pete Gallego (D-Tex.) argued, almost all of the recipients are either children or elderly.
What’s to become of these nutrition programs now is unclear. But even the Democratic-controlled Senate wants to cut them, by $4 billion, and the White House has said it can live with that number. So the argument our leaders are having really boils down to whether we’re going to cut or gut programs that keep at-risk kids from going without.
Some opponents of the bill practically burst into flames on the House floor, where some of the loudest voices were female: “Mitt Romney was right,” thundered Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) “You all do not care about the 47 percent! Shame on you!”
“Vote no! Vote no! It’s ridiculous what you’re doing to our children!” said Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.)
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi wasn’t shouting, but was shaming: To pass the bill, she said, was “to dishonor the God who made us.”
“To take food out of the mouths of babies? What are you thinking?” she asked. “Or are you thinking?”
Female anger is a hot topic right now; I just finished Claire Messud’s not-nice novel “The Woman Upstairs,” about an elementary school teacher who life has turned into a human cauldron and “a ravenous wolf.” Even the Blessed Virgin is fuming in Colm Toibin’s “The Testament of Mary.” And if Democratic women on the House floor on Thursday were no slouches in tearing the roof off, well, sometimes fury is the only rational response.
By: Melinda Henneberger, She The People, The Washington Post, July 11, 2013
“Flapping In The Wind”: For John Boehner, It’s Job Security Vs Legacy
House Speaker John Boehner stopped by the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill on Thursday afternoon to pitch a gathering of the National Association of Manufacturers on the Republicans’ plans for jobs and growth.
“While my colleagues and I don’t have the majority here in Washington,” the speaker vowed, “we will continue to pursue our plan.”
Or will they?
Not an hour after those words were uttered, Boehner’s House Republicans dealt him the latest in a series of humiliations. Sixty-two Republicans defied him and voted against the farm bill, defeating a major piece of legislation Boehner had made a test of his leadership by pushing for it publicly and voting for it personally — something speakers only do on the most important bills.
The dispute this time was over food stamps and agricultural subsidies, but the pattern was the same: House leaders lost Democratic support by tilting the bill to satisfy the Republican base, but a group of conservative purists remained upset that the legislation didn’t go far enough.
Much the same dynamic confronts Boehner as the House prepares to take up immigration legislation next month. A similar set of pressures has kept Boehner from negotiating a long-term budget deal with the White House.
In all instances, Boehner faces a choice: his job or his legacy. He can enact landmark compromises but lose his job in a conservative coup. Or he can keep his job but get nothing much done.
With a few exceptions — the “fiscal cliff” deal, Hurricane Sandy aid — Boehner has chosen job security over achievement. He did it again this week on immigration, announcing that he doesn’t “see any way of bringing an immigration bill to the floor that doesn’t have a majority support of Republicans.”
That promise, which is essentially the same as saying he won’t allow the House to take up legislation that includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, puts him on a collision course with the Senate, where a fresh compromise on border security negotiated by Republican Sens. Bob Corker (Tenn.) and John Hoeven (N.D.) make it likely that chamber’s legislation, which includes citizenship, will have a large bipartisan majority.
Boehner’s stance blocking an immigration compromise may preserve his speakership, but it would keep his party on what Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) calls a “demographic death spiral” as Latino voters shun the GOP. Beyond the party, Boehner’s position raises the likelihood of failure on another high-profile issue for a Congress that continues to reach new lows in public esteem. Gallup last week found Americans’ confidence in Congress at 10 percent, the lowest ever recorded for any institution.
And that was before Thursday’s farm bill debacle, which saw lawmakers debating all manner of parochial items — olive oil, hemp, Christmas trees, shellfish, even a dairy amendment involving Greek yogurt sponsored by the aptly named Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) — before killing the whole bill.
The bill, which had been awaiting action for a year, was never going to get much Democratic support because of $20 billion in cuts to food stamps. But Republicans lost what support they had on Thursday when they passed an amendment, opposed by all but one House Democrat, adding new work requirements to the food stamp program. That left only 24 Democrats on board, not close to enough to offset the dozens of Republicans who wanted the deeper cuts demanded by conservative groups such as the Club for Growth.
The agriculture committee chairman, Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), pleaded on the floor for colleagues to “put aside whatever the latest e-mail is” and vote with him. “And if you don’t,” he added, “they’ll just say it’s a dysfunctional body, a broken institution full of dysfunctional people.”
After the farm bill went down, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) came to the floor to blame Democrats for the collapse — an argument that might have made sense if Republicans hadn’t just forced through an amendment Democrats called intolerable.
Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the minority whip, reminded Cantor that “25 percent of your party voted against the bill . . . and your side’s going to continue to blame us that you couldn’t get the votes on your side.” Hoyer invoked Newt Gingrich’s 1998 speech calling conservative holdouts in the House “the perfectionist caucus.”
Gingrich did indeed call the Republican hard-liners perfectionists and “petty dictators.” He soon lost his job as speaker, in part because of that remark, but by then he had reached compromises with a Democratic president that righted the government’s finances.
It’s an example Boehner would do well to recall.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 21, 2013
“The Eric Cantor Story”: Waste, Fraud, And Abuse
The farm bill was defeated in part because they got fewer yea votes out of Democrats than they were hoping for. This happened, according to moderate Democrat Collin Peterson of Minnesota, because of a last-second amendment from Eric Cantor that sought to impose sterner work requirements on recipients of food stamps. Democratic whip Steny Hoyer says it took a bipartisan bill and turned it into a partisan bill.
This was just a cat-piss mean amendment that you have to think was almost designed to push Democrats away. Fraud in the food-stamp program (known by the acronym SNAP) is a frightening 1 percent, according to Think Progress. And existing work requirements are pretty stringent already. If you live in Cantor’s Virginia and want food stamps, here’s what you have to do, according to the state’s web site:
If you are age 18 to 50 and able to work, you may be subject to a work requirement in order to receive SNAP. This requirement would limit the number of months for which you could receive SNAP to three months in a 36 month period. After you receive SNAP for three months, you may be able to receive three additional months if you complete certain work related requirements. You may be exempt from this work requirement if you are currently working or participating in an approved work program; responsible for the care of a child; pregnant; medically certified as unable to work; meet one of several work registration exemption reasons; or live in an exempt locality.
I can’t find what these “certain work requirements” are, but it seems to me that having to re-meet them every three months provides a pretty constant check on people and meets a high standard of being responsible with the taxpayers’ money.
It’s just amazing to me the way they keep finding new ways to kick poor people. One, deregulate everything so that banks can start placing bets against their own securities. Two, destroy the economy, so that millions more people lose their jobs and have to go on food stamps in the first place. Three, decide that poor people have to pay the penalty for all this financial hanky-panky, and cut the federal programs they depend on to the bone. Four, cut food stamps even more, and make the recipients work more.
“Waste, fraud, and abuse” describe Eric Cantor’s contribution to this nation, his character, and his attitude toward people who aren’t rich.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 21, 2013
“What’s A Speaker To Do?”: The Farm Bill Failure Has Disastrous Implications For John Boehner
It’s hard to understate how much of a setback the farm bill’s surprise failure was for an already dysfunctional and divided House of Representatives.
It showed that House leadership doesn’t have a complete measure of the vote counts for even the most basic bills. It provided embarrassment all the way up to House Speaker John Boehner, who took the unusual step of publicly supporting the bill and voting for it. And it signaled possible turbulence ahead for other larger and higher-profile bills, such as one on the issue of immigration.
The debacle brings up fresh new questions about major legislation passing through the House. If Boehner can’t bring his conference together to move a farm bill through to a conference committee, what does it mean for immigration, debt ceiling, and government appropriations bills looming later this summer and fall?
The looming immigration fight, in particular, parallels the farm bill in many ways, though it could hypothetically have even more disastrous consequences for the Republican Party if it fails.
A similar version of a Senate farm bill that earned bipartisan support in a 66-27 vote failed to pass the House. Soon, an immigration bill that now looks likely to earn more than 70 bipartisan Senate votes could present Boehner with the same problem.
“The two are very different issues. However, the farm bill highlights how complicated things are here in the House,” one House GOP aide told Business Insider.
From here, the farm bill faces one of two likely fates — it could either face extinction, or House leadership could put a modified version on the floor. It’s unlikely, though, that a modified bill will come to the floor, considering that it would likely take more food-stamp cuts to earn Republican votes — something that would scare off Democrats. Most likely, a GOP aide said, a one-year extension will be passed, like both the House and Senate did last year.
A final version of any farm bill, even a one-year extension, will likely need a majority of Democrats to support its passage. The House last passed a farm bill extension as part of the bill to avert the fiscal cliff, which passed with a majority of Democrats supporting it. That overall bill required Boehner to break the Hastert Rule.
On immigration, Boehner will have an even narrower path to navigate. He has pledged to not allow a vote on a bill that does not garner majority support from Republicans. It’s clear that breaking that promise, however, is perhaps the only way a bill would pass through the House to become law — even if the Senate bill is watered down to earn more Republicans’ support.
Doing so would likely mean Boehner would face a revolt from conservative members of his caucus. Already, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) has warned him on his speakership.
One Democratic strategist, though, said Boehner might have to be willing to buck the majority of his caucus to do something he feels is necessary for the future of the party. The strategist pointed to comments from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) last weekend, who cautioned immigration reform was necessary to keep the GOP from falling into a “demographic death spiral.”
“He might have to decide between the short-term imperative of keeping his speakership,” the strategist said, “and the long-term imperative of the future of the Republican Party.”
By: Brett LoGiurato, Business Insider, June 21, 2013
“A Minimum Threshold For Competence”: The Republican House Of Representatives Is Still Terrible At Everything
Somehow or other, the U.S. government, for the first time in years, is close-ish to being functional. Don’t read too heavily into that word “functional.” The government is not and will not probably be moving on your pet issue any time soon, sorry. But the Senate is actually moving, on bipartisan pieces of legislation that are in the public spotlight: a farm bill, a comprehensive immigration bill. GOP senators who typically pretend to negotiate compromises and then run for the hills once they near a motion to proceed, like Lindsey Graham and Bob Corker, are suddenly seeing out those compromises. One of the two houses of Congress, in our lifetime, may well be nearing the minimum threshold for competence.
Now then, what’s the problem? Oh right, it’s the House of Representatives, which is terrible at everything, and offers no indication of being any other way until at least 2023. Let’s give some credit: They’re adept at passing go-nowhere bills to repeal Obamacare or ban abortion or tattoo the words “Under God” to every baby’s forehead. Great work there from the House Republican Party. On issues that might appeal to an even slightly broader cross-section of the country, though, they’ve got nothing. You know this. You’ve seen the same routine in nearly every important vote since 2009. Remember that time the government considered arbitrarily defaulting on the public debt and destroying the global economy forever? That was a head-scratcher for the House; took some real “working out” before they concluded it would best be averted, for now.
It always works out the same way, at the 11th hour. A Senate-originated compromise, after much pouting, is taken up by the House after several defeats of their own insane legislation. Maybe a tweak or two is offered. The House passes it. Conservatives serve up uncreative epithets for John Boehner for exercising the only decent option available to him. The next big piece of legislation comes up. And, at least as of yesterday’s farm bill flop, they begin this same fatal cycle of time wasting again.
The House leadership seemed to think, this time around, at least, that a combination of cheap tricks and a backup plan called “blaming Democrats” would change this deeply entrenched dynamic of incompetence that surrounds everything it tries to do.
The House didn’t even get to a vote on the farm bill last year, knowing it didn’t have enough votes. What could the leadership do differently this time to make sure that a bill hated by most Democrats and still too many Republicans, facing a certain Senate death and then if necessary a White House veto, could pass for no productive reason?
It could … put Iowa Rep. Steve King in charge of whipping? Yes. Yes! This would change the dynamic altogether. If a nutbird like Steve King was the one pushing for this bill then surely all conservatives would fall in line.
There’s little we enjoy more than watching a useless no-voting screecher in Congress suddenly realize he needs his goddamn corn money and then desperately try to persuade his comrades for their votes. And then when it fails, he is just so disappointed in their ability to see the bigger picture. Come on, guys, it’s about the long game here:
GOP leaders blamed Democrats and insisted their whip counts were accurate, even as Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who helped whip support for the bill, said he was surprised at the 62 GOP defections.
“I was surprised by about half of them,” he said. “I thought they would have taken more of a 10,000-foot view.”
Yes, show a little maturity for once, Steve King said, to other people.
Then the Republican leadership blames Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for only bringing 24 Democratic “aye” votes to the table. Jesus. We’re not sure that Nancy Pelosi got 24 votes from the Republican Party on all major bills combined in the years 2009 and 2010. Also, there’s a reason that most Democrats didn’t vote for this farm bill, and that’s because they hate it, because it assaults the social safety net. But yeah, anyway, sure, this is Nancy Pelosi’s fault, boo, she’s evil and wears a lot of makeup, boo.
There’s only one way to a bill becoming a law in this government setup, which we’re stuck with for a while: The House has to work within the framework of a Senate-drafted compromise, and lean on Democratic votes. This is the only way things work right now, and no special guest whip or hollering at the mean San Francisco lady will change that.
And of course yesterday’s farm bill failure has implications on comprehensive immigration reform, which will most likely soon pass through the Senate. It’s hard to come to any other conclusion than Brian Beutler’s:
But more broadly, it’s tough to look at the farm bill fiasco and imagine the House passing an immigration reform bill that Dems don’t carry.
If that’s the case, then the key to the whole immigration reform effort really is John Boehner accepting the internal consequences of just putting something similar to the gang of eight bill on the floor and getting out of the way.
You can watch the farm bill fail and reason that Boehner might think immigration reform isn’t worth it. Or you can watch the farm bill fail and reason that he might decide to dispense with all the member management theatrics and throw in with Democrats and GOP donors. But you can’t watch the farm bill fail and see the House GOP passing a Hastert-rule compliant immigration reform bill and going into conference with the Senate.
We’d say Boehner will go with option 2, bringing immigration to the floor and leaning on Democrats. There’s no mysterious character quirk specific to Boehner that always leads him to this conclusion, as conservatives seem to believe. His decisions follow a fairly simple weighing of the pros and cons, and anyone in his position would make the same ones. That’s why he still has his job: because there’s no other way to do it, and those who would hope to become speaker can see that.
By: Jim Newell, Salon, June 21, 2013
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