Do you think the Neocons in Congress know what if feels like to skip meals? To send their child to bed with a growling stomach? To know the panic of trying to make dinner for your family when all that's left in the pantry is a box of dry soup mix?
The Republicans in Congress have become the anarchists Harry Reid described. Our elected representatives have lost their moral compass, and we are the ones who suffer. In a vote last Thursday, House Republicans voted to make drastic cuts in the SNAP program, which provides nutritional support to millions of Americans.
Why the steep cuts to the food stamp program? Because these knuckle-draggers are so obsessed with the impossible task of overturning the Affordable Care Act they are willing to go to any extreme, including shutting down the government or starving the (non)working class, just to indulge their twisted fantasies.
Their heartless decision could impact millions of Americans, including tens of thousands of military veterans. Maybe these House hypocrites decided they'd fed them enough while they were fighting in our never-ending "terror" wars.
Thursday's House vote to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by $40 billion over 10 years proved, once again, that when the Republican drive to demonize poor people comes into conflict with the supposed Republican reverence for veterans, demonizing poor people wins. The bill would kick 170,000 veterans off food stamps, out of nearly 900,000 (!) veterans in the program.
The Daily Kos has more:
"Republican rhetoric was that the food stamp-slashing bill would continue food assistance for the virtuous poor -- children, seniors, disabled people, employed people -- and only cut assistance for able-bodied adults who don't want to work, preferring to live high on the hog off of their average benefit of around $4 a day. That's false in ways almost too numerous to count:
The bill contains no provisions for people who can't find work in an economy where there are three job seekers for every available job.
Republicans claimed unemployed people could fulfill the bill's work requirements by turning to job training programs, yet many people don't have access to job training programs and the bill did not fund them.
The bill would kick 2.1 million mostly working or elderly people out of SNAP by eliminating expanded categorical eligibility. On paper, these people's income or assets are above the SNAP threshold even though, in reality, they face significant expenses like child care in order to keep working, bringing them below the threshold."
And we are paying these Congressional knaves and cowards to starve the desperate among us. They might as well be wearing Marie Antoinette wigs and stuffing their mouths with chocolate croissants for all they care about their constituents who have been forced into the bread lines as a result of the Neocons' failed economic policies. Their bank deregulations, their Enrons, their cuts to education, their war profiteering; all this -- and more -- at the expense of the middle and working classes.
And now this. The grandest hypocrisy of all. Many of these fat-cat House Neocons who voted to repeal so-called "Obamacare" have secretly written letters asking for grant money once it is implemented in their states. They are joined by many of their GOP counterparts in the Senate who have also voted to repeal ACA in the past.
The Nation reported this in June, with little fanfare:
"Letters produced by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that many of these same anti-Obamacare Republicans have solicited grants from the very program they claim to despise. This is evidence not merely of shameless hypocrisy but of the fact that the ACA bestows tangible benefits that even Congress's most extreme right-wing ideologues are hard-pressed to deny to their constituents.
"Some of the letters obtained by The Nation are from lawmakers who are no longer in office, including Jerry Lewis, Bobby Schilling, Kay Bailey Hutchison and Robert Dold.
"As ... reported here last September, Congressman Paul Ryan, who as Mitt Romney's running mate in 2012 called for its repeal, sent a letter requesting ACA money for health clinics in his district two years earlier. The Nation has obtained documents revealing that at least twenty other Obamacare-bashing GOP lawmakers have similarly pleaded for ACA funds on behalf of constituents. Among them are Kristi Noem, a Republican lawmaker from South Dakota likely to run for the Senate next year, as well as Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who has been touted as a potential GOP presidential candidate in 2016.
"Senators:
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX)
Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS)
Senator John Cornyn (R-TX)
Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL)
Senator Rob Portman (R-OH)
Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT)
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