Will the Supreme Court allow Trump to illegally stop SNAP payments?
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Next up on the shadow docket:
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court late Friday to block a lower court’s order that would force the government to fully fund food stamps for millions of low-income Americans, shortly after a panel of appeals judges rejected that same request.
The administration filed the emergency appeal as a growing number of states, including New York, Kansas, Pennsylvania and Oregon, said that they had released full food stamp benefits to their residents anyway, as they scrambled to restart the nation’s largest anti-hunger program after weeks of delays.
The legal wrangling concerned the immediate fate of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps about 42 million poor Americans purchase groceries. For weeks, the Trump administration has repeatedly refused to tap an ample reserve of federal funds to sustain those benefits during the government shutdown, leaving roughly one in eight Americans at risk of financial hardship.
Even though President Trump has long claimed to possess vast powers over federal spending — and has frequently reprogrammed the budget to advance his agenda during the shutdown — he and his aides have maintained that they could not source all of the money to send full nutrition aid to the low-income families that receive them.
On the one hand, just doing nothing would be not only correct legally but would save Trump from doing something visible and unpopular. On the other hand, it’s an opportunity to take food away from poor people that probably appeals to the Republican justices as much as it does to Trump and the typical Republican legislature. The balance of equities here is probably bad news.