More than 40 million Americans are days away from losing their monthly food benefits as a result of the government shutdown — and the solution from many Republicans and Democrats is for the other side to cave.
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has already said that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will not be available in November, despite a SNAP contingency fund containing about $5 billion of the roughly $9 billion needed for food benefits next month. Republicans seem intent on putting Democrats to a choice: reopen the government and potentially accept Obamacare premiums spiking, or let people go hungry.
For Democrats like Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., the answer is an easy one: support the Republican continuing resolution.
Fetterman noted that he would like to extend the Obamacare tax credits to make health insurance more affordable, as Democrats are demanding in exchange for their support of the GOP funding bill. But Fetterman said he strongly disagrees with using a shutdown to extract those concessions, particularly when one of the potential outcomes is “hungry people.”
“That is the Democrats’ Sophie’s choice,” said Fetterman, who has voted with Republicans throughout the shutdown in support of the GOP’s funding bill.
Other lawmakers don’t seem to be budging, arguing that the prospect of hungry Americans should only motivate the other party to move off its shutdown position.
“If the Democrats don’t sign onto this C.R.,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., said of the GOP continuing resolution, “then we have a lot of things that are going to run out of money, and SNAP is gonna be one of them.”
When MSNBC asked Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., what she suggested families who rely on food benefits do come November, she had a simple answer. “Call your Democrat senator and tell them to open back up the government,” Britt said.
And facing the prospect of depleted food benefits, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., asked Politico what it was going to take “for the Democrats to say, ‘Gee, huh, maybe — maybe people should be able to eat?’”
Hawley has offered a temporary solution to the food aid cliff, introducing a bill to reinstate SNAP benefits. “Our kids deserve to eat,” Hawley said in a statement.
But the looming problem isn’t doing much to change the shutdown calculus, even for Democrats, though many Democratic lawmakers are looking for alternative solutions to the SNAP funding shortage.
Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal told MSNBC he is hoping his home state, Connecticut, will “fill in the gaps” for his constituents. “We’re very firm, explicit, clear, that we are going to insist on extending the health care tax credit and working at the same time for the SNAP benefits,” Blumenthal said.
Similarly, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., told MSNBC that in the coming weeks and months, state funding “is being redirected to try to fill in the gaps here.”
But Padilla also admitted that “there is no substitute for the federal government doing its job,” and that “the best way” to address the food aid cliff was for “Republicans to come to the table,