The hunger games

MAGA Republicans in the House are raging about the deal lifting the debt limit that President Biden brokered with GOP leaders. One key complaint of hard-right Republicans is that the work requirements they wanted to impose on food stamp recipients are less cruel than they’d hoped.

But liberals shouldn’t indulge in too much schadenfreude about this. In a few months, Republicans will have another chance to secure work requirements tied to food stamps, when the farm bill—sprawling legislation that touches every corner of food policy in America—comes up for re-authorization.

“I don’t think the conversation is over,” Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), a member of the House Agriculture Committee, told me. “Food security programs within the farm bill are under threat.”

Most indications are that the Biden-GOP deal will pass, lifting the U.S. borrowing limit for two years while restraining government spending, but by far less than Republicans had hoped.

Democrats agreed to extend work requirements for recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program on childless adults up to age 54, an increase from the previous limit of 49. But Democrats also secured new exemptions from work requirements for homeless people, veterans and adults raised in foster care. GOP hopes of expanding work requirements on other populations on public assistance— such as Medicaid recipients—were frustrated.

Those latter outcomes have MAGA Republicans in a fury. Rep. Chip Roy (Texas), a leader of the far-right Freedom Caucus, tweeted that the work requirements Republicans won are “minor.” Rep. Keith Self (Texas) fumed to reporters that the exemptions Democrats secured revealed the work requirements to be “sleight of hand,” as Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) nodded along.

In the coming debate this year over the farm bill—re-authorized about every five years— these Republicans will have another chance to add work requirements to SNAP.

There is little evidence that work requirements encourage recipients to work or boost their character, as Republicans claim. Yet, as an analysis from the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities concludes, these bureaucratic hurdles could put hundreds of thousands of additional adults at risk of losing food assistance.

But MAGA Republicans who view that number as not nearly large enough will surely expect to make up lost ground in the farm bill debate.

This could go beyond MAGA. A large bloc of House Republicans is expected to vote for the debt limit deal, but even some of them might be anticipating having another crack at work requirements.

Republicans who are vehement about expanding work recipients for SNAP recipients are trading on long-running right-wing tropes about welfare dependency in urban areas. Yet large numbers of rural Americans also rely on SNAP.

“The program has a direct impact on rural voters’ bank accounts and on local rural economies,” Matt Hildreth, a Democratic organizer in rural areas, told me. In a perverse twist, MAGA Republicans are in thrall to a vision of the rural-urban divide that, if further put into practice, could harm large numbers of their own rural constituents.

If MAGA Republicans push hard on this front in coming months, it could roil the delicate balance of interests historically needed to pass farm bills. These bills link rural stakeholders reliant on agricultural subsidies to urban constituencies that are dependent on food stamps (but not disproportionately so).

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), the chair of the upper chamber’s agriculture committee, sounded a defiant tone this week about the future of SNAP work requirements. “We are not entertaining any other changes in the farm bill,” Stabenow declared. “That debate is over.”

MAGA Republicans in the House, alas, will not surrender quite so easily.

Some facts about public schools from a 20-year veteran of the classroom: We still say the pledge. Students are allowed to pray. Critical race theory (CRT) is not being pushed. Students are not being “liberally” indoctrinated.

If you believe these things are happening, and are promoting them with memes on social media, then you aren’t solving problems. You are causing them.

Time for some real history. Ex-Confederates became Jim Crow Democrats after Reconstruction, and yes, they founded the KKK. From the late 1870s until the civil rights era, the Jim Crow Democrats ruled the South. However, when the Democrats embraced civil rights at the national level, a group that would become known as the “Dixiecrats” tried to break away from the party and form its own challenging faction. They failed. The political descendants of the Dixiecrats switched parties and gradually became quite influential in the GOP.

In the 1970s, the “moral majority” emerged. They were largely descendants of the Jim Crow Democrats, but were now Republicans. The moral majority would eventually morph into the religious right with the coming of Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Opposition to Barack Obama’s presidency gave rise to the Tea Party, a group that had much in common with the religious right. Eventually these two groups merged to bring us Trumpism.

What all this amounts to is that the Republicans are the inheritors of the Jim Crow legacy. So, when they remind us that the KKK was started by Democrats, now you know how the story turned out.

RL HUTSON

Cabot