Texas Republicans Fail to Kick a Million People off Food Stamps After Trying for a Year

The $867 billion Farm Bill passed by Congress this week did not include stricter work requirements that would have pummeled food stamp recipients, but it wasn’t for lack of trying by Texas’ Republican delegation.

The effort, spearheaded by Midland Congressman Mike Conaway, would have taken a hard line on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) beneficiaries, forcing poor people up to age 59 and parents of young children to lose food assistance for two calendar years if they lost their job or didn’t meet new work training requirements.

To hear Conaway, the outgoing chair of the U.S. House Agriculture Committee tell it, the proposed rules would’ve helped America’s working poor by “offering SNAP beneficiaries a springboard out of poverty to a good-paying job, and opportunity for a better way of life for themselves and their families.” So strong were Conaway’s convictions that SNAP recipients are “trapped in dependency” that he refused to agree to a Farm Bill without new work requirements for most of 2018, letting the 2014 bill expire and causing commodity, conservation and rural development programs to lose baseline funding and budget authority.

Congressman Jodey Arrington, a Lubbock Republican who also sits on the ag committee, said he was called by a higher power to take food out of the mouths of laid-off folks. “God … expects personal responsibility and he expects us to have responsible policies that pull us up and out of a cycle of dependency,” Arrington said in an impassioned speech on the House floor in April. Both Texans in the Senate, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, floated similar work requirements in the upper chamber but the proposals were non-starters.

Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-republicans-fail-to-kick-a-million-people-off-food-stamps-after-trying-for-a-year/