It’s Like, How Much More Republican Could This Be?

Finally, a way to get a bill through the House of Representatives: strip it of any defensible forms of spending, and everything is OK:

Indeed, the incredible position of many conservatives is that the government should be handing out money to people because they run a farm, but should not hand out money to people who happen to be poor. Heritage Action for America, a conservative lobbying group, has run an ad arguing that you “can call a food-stamp bill a farm bill, but it’s still a food-stamp bill.” The whole accusation here is that what purports to be a farm bill is really a plan to “bankroll president Obama’s food-stamp agenda.”

It’s no longer novel that conservative Republicans have positioned themselves to Obama’s left on domestic spending that benefits their own constituencies. We have seen three years of Republicans attacking Obama for robbing Grandma’s Medicare. But at least Medicare is a justifiable program. The existence of farm subsidies is insane, and the fact that a party that hates government so much it engages in a continuous guerilla war of shutdowns, manufactured currency crises, and outright sabotage can’t eliminate it may be the most telling indicator of the GOP’s venality. They only hate necessary government spending. Totally unjustifiable spending is fine with them.

Since this is probably a prelude to the Republicans trying to pass vicious cuts to food stamps in a stand-alone bill, Obama should certainly veto it in the unlikely event that it passes the Senate.