Last week, I stood alongside my Congressional Progressive Caucus colleagues at a news conference on the debt limit deal that, at the time, was still being negotiated by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Speaking to a room full of reporters, we rattled off the seemingly endless harm that MAGA Republicans’ bad deal would cause to vulnerable Americans. I opposed that bill when the House voted Wednesday, but it still passed. President Biden signed it into law Saturday.
It is not lost on me that had I not received the very federal assistance the GOP wants to cut, I might not be in the position I am in today.
As I reflect on the events of the past week and the details of the debt limit bill, it is not lost on me that had I not received the very federal assistance the GOP wants to cut, I might not be in the position I am in today.
Decades before I came to Congress, I was a single mom raising two boys. I relied on the food stamps program, as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, used to be called, to put food on the table for me and for my boys. At no point did I consider such assistance to be anything but a bridge over troubled waters. Without that lifeline, I don’t know how I, or my boys, would have gotten by.
Protecting SNAP benefits should be a nonpartisan issue. We are the only developed nation with such a pervasive hunger problem. More than 34 million Americans, including 9 million children, suffer from food insecurity. Four in five SNAP households include a child, an elderly individual or a person with a disability, and overall more than 65% of SNAP participants are in families with children.
The Republican narrative, though, is that people receiving such assistance are choosing it over employment, and that they must be made to work in order to receive SNAP benfits. According to a Department of Agriculture report published this year, “In fiscal year 2019, 42 percent of all SNAP participants lived in households with earned…
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