“The Republicans’ Food Stamp Fraud”: Telling Poor Children The Fourth Box Of Macaroni And Cheese Is Excessive Is Indecent
What’s the single worst thing the Obama-era Republicans have done? Tough one, I know.
But spare me a moment here—plus a thousand words down the page—and I think maybe you’ll agree with me that the single worst thing the Obama-era Republicans have done is try to push through a $40 billion cut to the food-stamps program. It’s just unspeakably cruel. They usually say publicly that it’s about saving money. But sometimes someone—one congressman in particular—lets slip the real reason: They want to punish poor people. The farm bill, which includes the food-stamp program, goes to conference committee next week. That’s where, the cliché has it, the two sides are supposed to “iron out their differences.” The only thing the Democrats on this committee should do with an iron is run it across the Republicans’ scowling faces.
The basic facts on the program. Its size fluctuates with the economy—when more people are working, the number of those on food stamps goes down. This, of course, isn’t one of those times. So right now the SNAP program, as it’s called, is serving nearly 48 million people in 23 million households. The average monthly individual benefit is $133, or about $4.50 a day. In 2011, 45 percent of recipients were children. Forty-one percent live in households where at least one person works. More than 900,000 are veterans. Large numbers are elderly or disabled or both.
It’s costing about $80 billion a year. Senate Democrats proposed a cut to the program. A small cut, but a cut all the same: $4 billion over 10 years. The Republicans in the House sought a cut of $20.5 billion over 10 years. But then the farm bill failed to pass. Remember that? When John Boehner didn’t have enough votes to pass his own bill? After that debacle, the House took the farm bill and split it into two parts—the subsidies for the large growers of rice and cotton and so forth, and the food-stamp program. Two separate bills. And this time, Eric Cantor doubled the cut: $40 billion over 10 years. This number, if it became law, would boot 3.8 million people—presumably, nearly half of them children—off the program in 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
These would come on top of cuts to the program that kick in Nov. 1. The 2009 stimulus bill included extra food-stamp money because unemployment was so high after the financial meltdown that legislators knew more people would be applying for SNAP assistance. So there was a “stimulus bump” in food-stamp spending, but that is now ending. A family of four would see a $46 cut each month.
The proposed GOP cut is such a piddling amount of money, in terms of the whole federal budget and especially when spread out over 10 years. But nearly half of it is quite literally taking food out of the mouths of children. What’s the point? The point really is that Tea Party Republicans think these people don’t deserve the help. That’s some fascinating logic. The economy melts down because of something a bunch of crooked bankers do. The people at the bottom quarter of the economy, who’ve been getting jobbed for 30 years anyway and who always suffer the most in a downturn, start getting laid off in huge numbers. They have children to feed. Probably with no small amount of shame, they go in and sign up for food stamps.
And what do they get? Lectures about being lazy. You may have seen the now-infamous video of Tennessee Congressman Steve Fincher, who told a crowd over the summer that “the Bible says ‘If you don’t work, you don’t eat.’” This while Fincher, a cotton farmer, has enjoyed $3.5 million in federal farm subsidies. This year’s House bill ends “direct payments” to farmers whether they grow any crops or not—except for one kind: cotton farmers.
Religious bloggers have noted that Fincher got his theology wrong and that the relevant passage, from Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, wasn’t remotely about punishing people too lazy to work. It was about punishing people who’d stopped working because they thought Jesus was returning any day now. So: mean bastard, hypocrite, and Scripture-mangling idiot to boot. Nice trifecta.
The other argument one sometimes hears concerns the dreadful curse of food-stamp fraud. The actual rate of food-stamp fraud—people selling their coupons for cash—is 1.3 percent, but this of course doesn’t prevent the right from finding a couple of garish anecdotes and making it seem as if they’re the norm. Voter fraud, Medicaid fraud, food-stamp fraud…Somehow, in Republican America, only poor people and blacks commit fraud.
This cut is the fraud, because it’s not really about fraud or austerity. It’s entirely about punishing the alleged 47 percent. The bottom half or third of the alleged 47 percent. It’s absolutely appalling. These folks have done a lot of miserable things in the past four years. But this—the morality of this is so repulsively backward, the indecency so operatically and ostentatiously broadcast, I think it takes the gold going away.
The conference process starts next Wednesday and is going to take maybe a few months. Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow has taken the lead on this issue and has been terrific. Ditto Pat Leahy. Max Baucus, I’m told, is a good get to go a little wobbly (surprise). But this is one where the Democrats have to say this won’t stand. It’s one thing to shut down the government for two weeks and take quixotic stabs at Obamacare. Telling poor children that that fourth box of macaroni and cheese is excessive is something very different.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 26, 2013
“Web Sites And Grave Sites”: Republicans Are Camping Out In Their Own Graveyard
Republicans are apoplectic about Healthcare.gov, the official Web site for the Affordable Care Act.
They are trying desperately to change the subject from their disastrous government shutdown by ranting about the failures of a government Web site that cost a tiny fraction of what was lost as a result of the shutdown.
Republicans are pretending that they care about the problems encountered in signing up for a system that many of them are bent on destroying.
They are demanding an immediate fix to something they want to break.
They are trying to deflect public outrage away from their record-low approval ratings.
The only problem for Republicans is that a technical issue isn’t likely to have legs. Yes, it’s embarrassing. Yes, it’s frustrating. Yes, it’s an unforced error.
But it’s also fixable, and in the grand scheme of things, a malfunctioning Web site is more understandable and less consequential than a malfunctioning political party.
The Web site will be fixed. Can the same be said of the party that has planted its flag on the outskirts of reason? Can the same be said of the party being hijacked by hyperpartisans?
In the long stretch of history, Obamacare will be judged on the merits of the policy, not the rollout of a Web site. That judgment will be sober and thorough. And along the way, as some things work and others don’t — as is the way with ambitious laws — things will be tweaked. But this is the law. It will be implemented, even over the wails of Republican resistance.
If Republicans are correct, that the law is the abomination that they say it is, it will be borne out in due time with jobs killed and premiums raised. If however they are not correct and the law succeeds, that will be borne out with a healthier, more secure population living longer lives with better financial futures.
In a way, it is the latter that worries some Republicans most — that the law will succeed over their Chicken Little, sky-is-falling naysaying. They need the law to fail to validate their enmity.
So they have focused their attention on a technical hiccup and tried to spin it as a symptom of systematic incompetency — if the Obama administration can’t run a complicated Web site, it is incapable of managing a complicated policy. But this logic simply pushes beyond credibility. As the president said Monday: “Let me remind everybody that the Affordable Care Act is not just a Web site.” The Web site is only a part of the whole.
But to many Republicans who are stuck fighting a battle that’s already been lost rather than moving on to the next challenge, this Web site problem offers a sliver of hope that they can turn people off from the law. So far, it isn’t working. According to a Gallup poll released Wednesday, there has been an uptick in support for the law since the Web site opened.
Sometimes you simply have to accept reality, and sometimes that reality is accepting defeat. Learn from it. Grow from it. But first you must admit it. That’s the modern Republican Party’s problem — blindness to the obvious.
The Republican Party’s conduct during this period in the country’s history will get the same sober, thorough judgment from history as the health care law, and that judgment is not likely to be kind.
History will record that this is the moment that the party camped out in its own graveyard, hastening the demise of its national viability; that it gave up on America, while constantly reminiscing about America as it once was; that its thought leaders were replaced by crusade leaders and the Grand Old Party saw its grandeur subside; that it came to realize that it couldn’t forever be the party of intransigence in a nation of progress, without being burned by the friction inherent in those two warring concepts.
This is the moment when the rest of America realized that opposition isn’t an idea, and preventing things from getting done is not the same as getting things done.
The Republican Party isn’t going away, but it is going down, and it seems unable and unwilling to stop the sinking.
In history’s view a problematic Web site is likely to barely register. But the problems with the Republican Party will loom large.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, October 23, 2013
“Dick Cheney’s Transcendent Cynicism”: Using The Same Self Serving Game, That’s How He Rolls
Dick Cheney’s cynicism knows no end.
Yet, it still has the power to amaze—especially when Cheney’s political machinations go to extremes.
Consider his current embrace of the Tea Party movement.
At a point when the Republican Party’s favorability ratings have collapsed to the lowest point in the history of Gallup polling, just about everyone who has an interest in the future of the Grand Old Party is fretting about the damage done by a movement so politically tone deaf that it thought the American people would embrace a politics of government shutdown and debt-ceiling brinksmanship in order to advance the impossible dream of “defunding Obamacare.”
But here’s Dick Cheney—taking time out from pitching his new book, Heart: An American Medical Odyssey—to rally to the defense of the movement.
Hailing the Tea Party as a “positive influence” on the Grand Old Party, he announced on NBC’s Today show that “it’s an uprising, in part, and the good thing is it’s taken place within the Republican Party.”
Despite the chaos it has unleashed within and around the party for which the 72-year-old former vice president serves as a grouchy grand old man, Cheney declared: “I don’t see it as a negative. I think it’s much better to have that kind of ferment and turmoil and change in the Republican Party than it would be to have it outside.”
“These are Americans,” he says of the Tea Partisans. “They’re loyal, they’re patriotic and taxpayers, and they’re fed up with what they see happening in Washington. I think it’s a normal, healthy reaction and the fact that the party is having to adjust to it is positive.”
That’s rich coming from Cheney.
No matter what anyone thinks about the Tea Party movement in its current managed and manipulated form, many of its most sincere adherents joined what they thought was a grassroots challenge to the Republican establishment.
And no one says establishment like Dick Cheney: a permanent fixture in and around Republican administrations since Richard Nixon turned the key at the White House. No one has fought harder than this guy has to maintain the crony capitalist project that has made the modern GOP a lobbying agency for Wall Street speculators, bailout-seeking bankers and defense contractors like his own Halliburton.
Cheney’s everything Tea Party activists say they are fighting against.
So what’s the former vice president up to?
The same self-serving gaming of the process in which the man who arranged his own nomination as George W. Bush’s running mate has always engaged.
Asked about Ted Cruz, Cheney declined to criticize the Texas senator who steered the party off the charts when it comes to disapproval among the great mass of voters.
That’s because Cheney doesn’t at this point have any interest in the great mass of American voters. He’s interested in the handful of Wyoming Republican primary voters who will decide the fate of daughter Liz Cheney’s challenge to Republican Senator Mike Enzi.
Enzi is a steady conservative whose only “sin” was to get in the way of Cheney-family ambition. But he is in the way, so Dick Cheney is quite willing to remake himself as the Tea Party’s ardent defender in order to aid Liz Cheney’s campaign.
Indeed, instead of ripping Cruz—as he would have done in his former days as a White House chief of staff, GOP congressional leader, secretary of defense and vice president—Cheney now compares Cruz with daughter Liz.
“I think [Cruz] represents the thinking of an awful lot of people obviously in Texas,” says Dick Cheney. “But my own daughter is running for U.S. Senate in Wyoming partly motivated by the concern that Washington is not working, the system is breaking down and it’s time for new leadership.”
Shameless? Well, yes.
But that’s how Dick Cheney rolls.
The Republican Party is just a vehicle.
The state of Wyoming is just a political playground.
What matters to Cheney is the Cheney brand. And if he has to attach a Tea Party label in order to advance it, why Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney is more than willing to oblige.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, October 22, 2013
“The Ted Cruz Armageddon Is Coming”: For Now, He’s On Probation
Did you catch Ted Cruz’s numbers in that Pew poll that came out this week? You may not have, because there were a few other things going on. So take a guess as to his favorable ratings among Tea Party people. I can tell you that 18 percent expressed no opinion, so the numbers add up to 82. So, 65-17, 68-14? Could he possibly have topped 70?
He sure could have. It was 74-8. Eight! It used to be 47-10 in a prior poll. In other words, a lot of people who weren’t able to form an opinion of him now can, and it’s swooning. Among non-Tea Party Republicans, as you’d imagine, a rather different story: It’s 56-44 (everyone has an opinion!). That’s favorable, but it ain’t 74-8. And in these numbers, among dozens of other auguries, we see the Armageddon that’s coming in the GOP between now and 2016. What on earth are the establishment Republicans going to do about this man?
Examine with me a few more numbers, from an earlier Pew survey taken over the summer. That one found that while Tea Party people make up 40 percent of Republican voters, they make up 49 percent, or roughly half, of those who vote in every primary. Got that? OK.
So now put the two surveys together: Half of the most loyal Republican voters approve of Cruz at 90-percent levels (74 is nine-tenths of 82). Still think he couldn’t win the nomination?
You better believe he can. The chance that he could win a presidential election is as close to zero as any plausible candidate’s chance could be. I think he tops out at around 180 electoral votes. But the nomination? Not. Impossible. At. All.
So I ask again: What are the establishmentarians going to do? What, for example, can Mitch McConnell do? Not a whole lot. Individual senators are pretty autonomous. Remember when liberals were screaming during the health-care debate, “Why doesn’t Obama give Ben Nelson the Johnson Treatment?” Because the Johnson Treatment doesn’t work anymore, least of all on the serenely messianic, of which Cruz is definitely one.
Can a group of establishment senators break him, as a previous cohort, led by Margaret Chase Smith, broke Joe McCarthy? They can try, and that might make some difference. Their success will depend to a great extent on where the right-wing media decide to land. Will Roger Ailes and the rest of them do what’s right for the party and the country, or for the ratings and the bottom line? Why do I not want to know the answer to that question?
Much will hinge on what happens in 2014, in the coming crisis negotiations and then in the elections. If Cruz overreaches in January, they’ll polish him off. He is presumably smart enough to know that he’s on probation. So my guess is that as the January deadline approaches, Eddie Haskell will start bringing the teacher some apples. He’ll behave. Oh, he’ll mis-behave just enough to signal to the peanut gallery that he’s still Eddie Haskell; the world’s Eddie Haskells can’t help themselves. But he’ll keep it in line. And if he’s very smart, he’ll do those little, sugary things that senators value so much—the hand-written note when the wife’s checked into the hospital, that sort of thing.
He’ll spend the rest of 2014 guiding the Tea Party like Columbus on the Santa Maria. Rand Paul will be back there on the Niña, and farther back, Marco Rubio on the Pinta, straining to catch enough wind to keep up. But everyone will know who’s holding the compass.
The elections will be crucial. If the GOP loses control of the House because of perceived Tea Party looniness, Cruz will be blamed and held accountable. As for the Senate, it’ll be just slightly more nuanced. We’re seeing now that all these Tea Party people are going to challenge establishment Republicans. If some of them win their primaries but lose the general to a Democrat—if, say, Nancy Mace, the Citadel grad, beats Lindsey Graham but then loses in the general, giving South Carolina its first non-racist Democratic senator since Fritz Hollings, who’s probably the only non-racist Democratic senator the state has ever had—Cruz will, again, be blamed and held accountable. But say Mace wins, and a few others do too, even if the GOP doesn’t take control of the Senate. And say the Republicans hold the House. That’s a slightly ambiguous result. But any ambiguous result is easy for a demagogue to spin into a great victory. It’s precisely the kind of thing demagogues do best.
If the results a year from now don’t give the establishment the excuse it needs to bury him, Cruz will be off to the races. And then, Armageddon will come. To whom will the establishment hand the silver cross and vial of holy water? Chris Christie? Jeb Bush? South Dakota Senator John Thune, who offends no one (not yet, anyway) and who quietly voted for the deal to reopen the government and avoid default?
This will be a war. And it just might be a war the extremists will win. Establishments have power and money, and it is true that Republican voters have typically, after all the noise, gone in the establishment direction (McCain, Romney). But the insurgents have been advancing the beachhead, and unless they’re pushed back once and for all, it’s only a matter of time. But an epic battle looms. I cry for what these maniacs are doing to my country, but at the same time I plan on enjoying every minute of it.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, October 18, 2013
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