Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.) Bradly J. Barton/ONP/ZUMAPress
Congress
is getting ready to pass a farm bill—the $500 billion piece of
legislation that funds agriculture and nutrition programs—that will cut
funding for food stamps. As
Mother Jones reported last week,
Democrats in the House are considering banding together to derail the
bill entirely, thus preserving nutrition funding at its current level.
Support for that idea is building.
The House and Senate are currently negotiating a compromise farm bill
that will contain food stamps cuts somewhere between the $4 billion the
Senate wants and the $40 billion the House wants. (These cuts will come
on top of the
$5 billion in funding reductions to food stamps
that went into effect at the beginning of the month as extra stimulus
money for the program expired.) On Thursday, Reps. Alcee Hastings
(D-Florida) and Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.), co-chairs of the
Congressional Homelessness Caucus—a group of House lawmakers devoted to
policies that help the extremely poor—signaled that they are drumming up
support for no votes on any compromise bill. The two lawmakers asked
members of the caucus to sign a letter to the House and Senate
agriculture committees opposing
any cuts to the food stamp program, called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
"For those living without permanent housing, everyday life is
extremely difficult," the lawmakers say in the letter. "SNAP benefits
provide these individuals with a limited opportunity to obtain
nourishment."
House Democrats wager that if enough House Republicans vote against a
final farm bill because they think the food stamps cuts are not deep
enough, only a small group of Dems will need to also vote against the
bill in order to kill it. In this case, food stamps would continue to be
funded at current levels.
There is precedent for this idea: the last food stamps battle. In June, the
House failed to pass a farm bill
that cut $20 billion from SNAP because 62 conservative Republicans
thought that wasn't enough and 172 Democrats thought the reductions were
far too deep. This time around, food stamps funding will probably be
cut by around $10 billion in the farm bill, according to a Democratic
aide. That means far more GOPers will vote against the bill. The more
Republicans that House Speaker John Boehner loses, the more Dems he'll
need to pass the farm bill. If Democrats don't play ball, they'll
win—which could keep thousands of Americans from destitution. "For many
families with limited resources living close to or at the poverty
level," Hastings and Johnson write in the letter, "cuts to food benefits
[would] force them to choose between food and rent."
