House Extremists: Starve the Poor
If anyone still has questions about just exactly how much extremist House Republicans loathe low-income families, they got answers last night when the U.S. House voted down its agriculture spending bill in a 195 to 234 vote.
The bill was defeated because Democrats and sane Republicans rejected $20.5 billion in cuts to desperately needed food assistance that would have taken food from the mouths of nearly 2 million low-income individuals—mostly working people and seniors—while cutting free school meals for 210,000 children and slashing food help for an additional 850,000 households.
But for some Republicans, the fact that food aid would be cut wasn’t the problem with the bill. Their problem was the farm bill didn’t cut food aid enough!
Some of them had tried to stink up the bill even more before it went to a vote, with amendments adding punitive work requirements and authorizing states to drug test food stamp applicants.
The extremist House Republican contempt for low-income working families is nothing short of disgusting. As the Los Angeles Times editorialized before the vote: “Americans should not starve.”
