Billionaire fights desperately to ensure the poor starve

Good explainer here from Steve Vladeck about the inside baseball procedural game that’s being played at the SCOTUS now in regard to funding SNAP. Specifically, he addresses the question of why KBJ issued an administrative stay late last night, temporarily staying the district court’s order requiring the program to continue to be funded:

As for why Justice Jackson did it, to me, the clue is the last sentence. Had Jackson refused to issue an administrative stay, it’s entirely possible (indeed, she may already have known) that a majority of her colleagues were ready to do it themselves. I still think that this is what happened back in April when the full Court intervened shortly before 1 a.m., without explaining why Justice Alito hadn’t, in the A.A.R.P. Alien Enemies Act case. And from Jackson’s perspective, an administrative stay from the full Court would’ve been worse—almost certainly because it would have been open-ended (that is, it would not have had a deadline). The upshot would’ve been that Judge McConnell’s order could’ve remained frozen indefinitely while the full Court took its time. Yesterday’s grant of a stay in Trump v. Orr, for instance, came 48 days after the Justice Department first sought emergency relief.

Instead, by keeping the case for herself and granting the same relief, in contrast, Justice Jackson was able to directly influence the timing in both the First Circuit and the Supreme Court, at least for now. She nudged the First Circuit (which I expect to rule by the end of the weekend, Monday at the latest); and, assuming that court rules against the Trump administration, she also tied her colleagues’ hands—by having her administrative stay expire 48 hours after the First Circuit rules. Of course, the full Court can extend the administrative stay (and Jackson can do it herself). But this way, at least, she’s putting pressure on everyone—the First Circuit and the full Court—to move very quickly in deciding whether or not Judge McConnell’s orders should be allowed to go into effect. From where I’m sitting, that’s why Justice Jackson, the most vocal critic among the justices of the Court’s behavior in Trump-related emergency applications, ruled herself here—rather than allowing the full Court to overrule her. It drastically increases the odds of the full Supreme Court resolving this issue by the end of next week—one way or the other.

The background reality here is that this is all purely voluntary on the part of the Trump administration: Even Trump’s lawyers haven’t come up with an argument to the effect that the administration can’t continue to fund SNAP — they are merely going to court to vindicate Trump’s legal right to starve Americans in the service of the plutocracy.

This is a point for a separate post, but I think it’s always it’s important to emphasize that food scarcity in a nation as unimaginably wealthy as the United States has become — we are three and a half times wealthier per capita than when JK Galbraith pointed out that we had become a crazy rich country in The Affluent Society 67 years ago! — is 100% a purely political choice, as opposed to something imposed on us by any kind of actual scarcity, in the economic or environmental senses of that word.

Vladeck’s plea that “we should be doing everything we possibly can to feed those who can’t afford to do so themselves” unfortunately replicates the standard frame for discussing this issue, which assumes that hunger in a place like America is something that can be ameliorated but not eliminated. And that’s false. Eliminating hunger in America in 2025 would be a simple thing to do, and we don’t do it because we affirmatively, as a society, choose not to do it. Donald Trump’s disgusting personal cruelty regarding this issue just puts an exclamation point on that.