(The cartoon image above is by Mike Konopacki at Huck/Konopacki Cartoons.)If you think the congressional Republicans have been about as mean as possible, then you're in for a shock in the next two years. The Republicans in the 113th Congress cut the SNAP Program funding (food stamps), and would have made deeper cuts in that program if the Senate had not stopped them. But even those deep cuts the congressional Republicans wanted is not as bad as what the new GOP senators want to do.
There will be ten new Republican senators sworn in to the 114th Congress, and they have already marked themselves as hard-hearted to the extreme. They are Cory Gardner (Colorado), David Perdue (Georgia), Joni Ernst (Iowa), Thom Tillis (North Carolina), Tom Cotton (Arkansas), James Lankford (Oklahoma), Steve Daines (Montana), Mike Rounds (South Dakota), Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia), and Ben Sasse (Nebraska).
Why do I call these ten new senators hard-hearted? Because they have all gotten together and signed a pledge -- a pledge to completely eliminate the SNAP Program (food stamps). That's right. They don't just want to cut some of the funding going to feed poor Americans -- they want to do away with the whole program.
Now you may be thinking that they just want to replace that program with another government program -- one that would work better. But that is not true. David Perdue makes their intentions pretty clear when he says the SNAP Program needs to be replaced "with free market solutions". And in case you didn't know it, "free market solutions" is Republican code for not spending any government money on a thing.
What is that "free market solution"? It's pretty simple. These are all teabagger senators who have completely bought into the ludicrous and failed "trickle-down" GOP economic policy. They actually believe that if they give more tax cuts to the rich, eliminate regulations on Wall Street and the giant banks, and give the huge corporations a lower tax rate and more subsidies, that will somehow magically lift the poor out of poverty. It has never worked in the past (when it only increased poverty and food insecurity), but Republicans (including these new teabaggers) are not ready to give up a policy that puts more money into the bank accounts of the rich.
Around 15% of the American population lives in poverty (including 20% of the nation's children), and the SNAP program insures they have enough to eat (without having to sacrifice some other need -- housing, clothing, education, transportation, etc.). But these new Republicans don't care about that. They will happily throw many millions of poor children and adults under the bus to get more money to give to the rich. They will tell you that private charities can feed the poor, but that is just not true. In fact, the failure of private efforts to solve the hunger problem in this country is why we had to create the SNAP Program in the first place.
Making this hard-hearted approach to governing even harder to understand is the fact that every one of those new senators (and most of the people who voted for them) loudly claim to be christian. They obviously need to read the portions of their bible where Jesus commanded them to feed and clothe the poor. How christian can they be while ignoring some of the most important commandments of their "savior"?
(The cartoon image above is by Bill Day at cagle.com.)
