When President Trump appealed last Friday a federal court decision that required Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program November benefits be fully paid out of USDA emergency funds despite the fact that the country was in the midst of a government shutdown, his Justice Department wasn’t just raising a constitutional issue about the executive branch’s ability to direct such funding without Congressional approval. He was also looking out for Americans who are in danger of being overridden and bankrupted by an underclass who represent a tremendous burden on the national coffers.
Late Friday a lightning-fast Supreme Court ruling—issued by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—overrode the lower court, placing its ruling’s constitutionality in question and temporarily upholding the grounds for Trump’s appeal. The override stipulated that only partial payments can be made to the 42 million SNAP recipients while the issue wrangles its way through the courts. Many states had already fully disbursed November’s payment in the brief window created by the lower court ruling.
Sunday night, with SNAP in limbo, in a late-Senate session on the shutdown, eight Democrat Senators agreed to “temporarily” jettison the key negotiation sticking point—Obamacare subsidies that included illegal immigrants. In a test vote they reached the 60-vote margin needed to beat the filibuster and open the government.
At this hour, Monday night, the Senate passed the deal. Next the House must approve, and President Trump must sign. In the wake of the agreement, the Trump Administration is insisting that any SNAP payments disbursed between the time the federal court directed those payments and the Supreme Court nixed the lower court ruling must be returned to federal government coffers.
Unbelievably, there are questions about the source of those disbursements, some coming from state funds and other from federal funds. There’s no easy mechanism to return the money sent to members of SNAP. Such is the chaos created by the Democrat shutdown.
It’s a bold hand played by Trump, beating back Democrat Party machinations designed to legally constrain his decision-making and directives. Strong because he and his administration know that the left-wing narrative about how Trump turned blind eyes and closed ears to people faced with hunger will remain an opposition talking point into the midterm elections. The Supreme Court ruling that upheld the constitutionality of the basis for Trump’s appeal further fuels that narrative. Shutdown rhetoric about how Trump is “building a grand ballroom for his billionaire friends and aligned foreign leaders while stripping bare the pantries of the nation’s poor” angrily amped up in the wake of what many outraged Democrats characterized as a Senate “cave in.”
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Lost on millions of low-information voters and opportunistically obfuscated by the left is that the longest government shutdown in US history happened because Democrats presented the Republican Party with an offer they couldn’t accept: taxpayer-funded healthcare for illegal aliens. To accept that demand as a condition for opening the government would’ve cost Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress a potentially fatal loss of credibility, especially with the hardcore MAGA base.
Trump’s hardline on SNAP appeals to millions of hard-working, traditional-minded citizens who still believe in the principle of self-reliance. They believe there should be a governmental safety net to keep the most vulnerable among us from starving, or dying, in the streets. But knowledge about how corrupted, how wasteful, how gamed what used to be called “welfare” is in our time has created a fatigue with the non-producers, those on the dole, many of them for generations, and many of them in the country illegally.
While the legacy media bleats about Trump’s heartlessness, his steadfastness on issues like immigration enforcement, tariffs, and, most importantly in the shutdown debate, healthcare, many among the populace see things differently. They understand and support what he’s trying to do. They want no quarter given on the ridiculous demands made to arm-twist House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune into a Democrat-friendly and prohibitively expensive defeat.
For years, Republicans like Mitch McConnell, John McCain, and Mitt Romney folded under the tyrannical, media-enabled Democrat glare that usually succeeded in casting them as the bad guys, even after they blinked and came to the table. Trump soundly thumped anti-sovereignty, borderless, socialist threats to American values in the last election. With all bets, demographics—and even food—on the table, he continues the fight.