Friday, July 12, 2013

GOP Excludes Food Stamps from Farm Bill


For a political party that falls all over itself pretending to honor - indeed worship - Christian values, the passage of a GOP Farm Bill yesterday that excluded any funding for Food Stamps (which were described as one of "some extraneous pieces") demonstrates that the hypocrisy of today's Republicans is now complete.  How is one honoring the Gospel message of feeding the hungry and caring for the poor when one votes for passage of legislation that kicks their poor and hungry to the curb?  These modern day Pharisee truly would like to see the poor just die off and disappear.  Especially if they are non-white.  Mitt Romney's "the 47%" comment did indeed show today's real GOP.  A column in the Washington Post looks at this disgusting display of GOP hypocrisy and selfishness:

There was a rare moment of candor on the House floor this week.  Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.), a committee chairman and the man who led House Republicans to their majority in 2010, was explaining why he and his colleagues decided to drop the food stamp program from the farm bill. 

“What we have carefully done is exclude some extraneous pieces,” he said.  Extraneous? For almost 50 years, food stamps have been part of the annual farm bill, and the $80 billion spent on the program keeps tens of millions of Americans, about half of them children, from going hungry.

Without a single Democratic vote, House Republicans narrowly passed a bill that, if allowed to stand, would provide hundreds of billions of dollars in agriculture subsidies but not a dime for the hungry. Happily, Americans are unlikely to starve as a result of Thursday’s vote because the Senate won’t allow the House’s farm bill to become law if the food stamp program isn’t restored.

But as a political matter, the food stamp folly shows just what a difficult situation Republican leaders find themselves in. For the second time in two days, they had been forced to placate conservatives in their own ranks by taking a position that alienates crucial segments of the electorate.

On Wednesday, the House GOP caucus huddled and determined that, because of conservatives’ objections, they would not take up the bipartisan Senate immigration bill, or any major immigration legislation, anytime soon.

. . . . inviting new charges that Republicans are hostile to racial minorities — 36 percent of food stamp beneficiaries are identified as white — and the poor. 

Today's "conservatives" - most of whom describe themselves as "godly Christians" - are horrible people who care nothing about others and add daily fuel to why one would never be described as a Christian.  

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