Don't Let Them Eat Cake

     Since I'm on SNAP, I've been paying close attention to what's going on with the federal courts and the cruel and crazy bastards in the Trump junta. It's been insane, to say the least, since people lost their benefits a month into the shutdown. Two federal judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island ordered the government to pay out the SNAP benefits in full or at least partially.

     US District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island has been especially vocal and angry at the administration for openly defying his court orders. McConnell handed down another ruling in which he wrote in a 27 page ruling, “People have gone without for too long. Not making payments to them for even another day is simply unacceptable.”

     This was notable in that it demanded satisfaction and wasn't one of those countless federal court stays or temporary injunctions to give the administration time to prepare an appeal or to establish standing. McConnell was unambiguous: Disburse the SNAP benefits now.

     Brooke Rollins, the worst Agriculture Secretary since Johnny Carson foil Earl Butz, said that the funds in its discretionary fund (totalling about $5.5 billion) couldn't be dispersed because they couldn't be spent on anything other than a weather emergency such as a hurricane or tornado. Yes, this government thinks that impending famine doesn't constitute an emergency.

     McConnell doubled down and reminded the government that, as SNAP is Congressionally allocated, the government needed to disperse whatever finds they had. In addition to the $5.5 billion contingency fund, the USDA also has another fund totaling tens of billions more that could fund the SNAP program for several months.

     In its bifurcated madness, the government said it would fund about two thirds of the SNAP benefits, then the next day said it would fund 100% of them (SNAP costs the government about $8 billion a month). Then the USDA thought up a new argument to let people starve:

     Blame the Democrats for the shutdown. The shutdown was a congressional problem and they had to solve the shortfall. JD Vance piled on yesterday and said it shouldn't be up to judges to order the government to do anything, although that's exactly the point of having a federal judiciary.

     McConnell handed down another decision yesterday supporting a lower court's decision to disburse the SNAP funds as soon as possible. SNAP is federally-funded but managed by the states and Rollins' office said it may take weeks or even months to make those funds available. Then the USDA hit the states with a Byzantine set of complex rules to get the system up and running again.

     Today, the Trump administration vowed to appeal the ruling in Superior Court. Then, just hours later, the FNS (Food and Nutrition Service) announced to all state SNAP agency directors that the disbursements would be made in full, after all, essentially rendering the administration's appeal null and void.

     It's like watching that scene in Star Trek's "Plato's Stepchildren" in which dwarf actor Michael Dunn's character, Alexander, is partially under the control of his psionic overlords. He's commanded by them to kill Captain Kirk with a dagger and he spastically turns this way and that, plainly conflicted.

     That's what we're seeing here except this isn't a teleplay. It's real life. 42,000,000, 16,000,000 of them children, are on SNAP, the largest anti-hunger program in the government, the late Shirley Chisholm's greatest legacy. With people dependent on the now-disappeared SNAP at a time when grocery prices are going through the roof, it's a double whammy that the 1 in 8 people on SNAP cannot endure for long.

     And it should not take several court orders to get the government to feed tens of millions as they're mandated to do by law.

     It's obvious that the Republicans engineered and are continuing this shutdown to use hunger as a leverage against Democrats. That's despicable enough but hardly surprising considering this is the same government that axed funding for school lunches across the country. Yet, according to these right wing sadists, paying out the SNAP funds will impact on school lunches yet again, as if Republicans give a shit whether our kids have lunch at school.

     Maybe it's a little easy to see too much into last Tuesday's elections and the near clean-sweep that favored Democrats. But Republicans have yet to learn that if you want to get the voters on your side, starving them to bring the other party into submission isn't the way to go about doing it. It's dangerous enough for politicians when people vote with their wallets. But when they start voting with their growling stomachs, it'll be catastrophic.

 

Addendum:  I don't know about other states but here in Arizona, the DES (Division of Economic Security) released full SNAP benefits just minutes ago. Again, this shouldn't have taken this long and the government shouldn't have to be brow-beaten by two federal judges to feed its own people. But, in less than a month, if things aren't resolved, we'll be back in the same shit we were in until today. Again, the only reason we got our SNAP benefits today was because they came out of a limited contingency fund. This is a stopgap measure only.