Today is the last day of the legislative session before Election Day. Lawmakers will go home to campaign on September 21, which is the earliest date during an election cycle in decades. And they leave a lot of pending legislation on the table. As John Boehner announced in the above clip, the House plans to [...]

The House Agriculture Committee passed its version of the farm bill yesterday, setting it up for passage in the House and a contentious fight over food stamp cuts that could affect up to 3 million recipients. The House bill, which passed 35 to 11, would reduce food and nutrition spending by more than $35 billion, [...]

The Senate already passed a farm bill that cut food stamps by around $4.5 billion. The House’s version is even more punitive, and House Democrats are upset that their leader on the Agriculture Committee let it go through without putting up much of a fight. Liberal Democrats are fuming over $16 billion in cuts to [...]

The House Agriculture Committee leadership released their version of the farm bill late yesterday, and the main difference from the version that passed the Senate concerns food stamps: The legislative draft envisions reducing current food stamp spending projections by $1.6 billion a year, four times the amount of cuts incorporated in the five-year, half-trillion-dollar farm [...]

Arthur Delaney fires some shots: In order to help pay for a series of high-priority spending bills in 2010, congressional Democrats raided future funding for food stamps, promising to put the money back before any cuts took effect. Now that the cuts are around the corner, Democrats aren’t talking about replacing the money. Instead, they’re [...]

Hundreds of thousands of food stamp recipients will lose at least $90 a month in benefits, after an amendment to the farm bill failed badly in the Senate. The Senate overwhelmingly rejected a bid to preserve some $4.5 billion in food stamps funding, as part of the massive farm bill, on Tuesday. The amendment to [...]

The Senate reached a deal on amendments to the farm bill, which will allow them to begin voting today. In all, 73 mostly but not entirely germane amendments will be voted upon, stretched over two days, with the goal of wrapping up the bill by the end of the week. So what is in this [...]

The farm bill is always one of the more sausage-making bills in Congress, actually literally so. Every five years agribusiness interests and the politicians who get contributions from them divy up a giant pot of money and ensure that the corporate welfare can keep flowing. In previous years, subsidies went to commodity crops like corn [...]

The House will “deem” their FY2013 budget passed today, a tactic that didn’t work when they tried it last year. The “deeming resolution” won’t even come up in the context of a budget bill, but a separate measure on gun rights. The House leadership claims that this is necessary because of the failure of the [...]

Now that we’ve exposed the flaws from cutting welfare so it cannot provide adequate benefits during an historically bad recession, we can gather a new appreciation for the main mandatory spending program on the poor that has served to keep them afloat in these troubled times. That would be the food stamp program, also know [...]

Democratic operatives are pouncing on Mitt Romney’s statement to CNN that he’s not concerned about the “very poor.” His context is that we already have a safety net for the very poor, and he wants to focus on the middle class. This may be unstated, but it’s the dominant perspective of everyone who runs for [...]