The Senate parliamentarian nixed GOP plans to push the costs of SNAP onto the states, a plan that would lead to inevitable deep cuts in food assistance, in order to help pay for their Big Ugly Mega Bill. This is actually doing these heartless pricks a huge favor. Bad enough these guys want to close hundreds of rural hospitals to give tax breaks to billionaires, but wanting to cut food aid to poor people too?

As Alfred Henry Lewis said well over a century ago, “It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen.”

Those of us who are well fed, well garmented and well ordered, ought not to forget that necessity makes frequently the root of crime. It is well for us to recollect that even in our own law-abiding, not to say virtuous cases, the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had. It may be taken as axiomatic that a starving man is never a good citizen. With this in our mind, what shall be said of the man who arranges famine, who forces a labor strike with its privation, its rioting, its disorder, its bayonet thrusting, and its blood-letting as an incident in his money heaping? If necessity breeds crime, what is he who creates the necessity?
New York Journal, October 13, 1896.