I think Dems should have gotten more out of this shutdown but I’m getting the sense that they will have another bite of the apple soon.

With the Winter Holidays taking up a lot of space in the legislative calendar, January will be here before Congress knows it!

Dems have been promised a vote on the ACA in December. And they can shut everything down again in January if they aren’t satisfied.

Critically, the White House won’t have their flimsy excuse to shut down SNAP in January because that program will be funded through September.

If the Speaker feels this way, the appropriate response is to draft a bill and argue for it in Congress, where he works. If he wins over enough legislators, he can pass the bill into law. Instead, he has taken a 6 week vacation while the President has illegally shut down a program Congress created!

SNAP needs $8 billion in November. The contingency fund has an estimated $5-6 billion in it. Not enough. But USDA has another $23 billion in transferable money in its School Meals account. I’d estimate SNAP could be funded for 3-4 months in this way. Depending on various burn rates.

If the President wants the government to reopen, he should sit down and negotiate with Democrats! He should not starve his own people!

There’s no reason to believe that the President would stop doing those things if Democrats voted with him!

Trump is starving the poorest people in our society because Democrats won’t let him repeal Obamacare. Why would they vote to fund a government so mired in bad faith?

I think this is going to do the opposite. The Trump Administration is demonstrating for everyone to see that they desperately need to be reined in. The President is ignoring laws and hurting people.

Anyway, the Trump Administration has the power to turn SNAP back on. They only turned it off because they hope it will demoralize Democrats and scare them into voting for their bill that functionally takes Americans’ healthcare away.

They got away with doing this to foreigners. Now they are doing it to Americans.

It makes me wonder what else they are currently doing to “foreigners/migrants/illegals” that they hope to eventually do to Americans?

In short, the Trump White House is illegally impounding funds that are supposed to be spent on Americans.

This is pretty similar to what they did with USAID. Congress mandated that the White House deliver aid to the poor. The White House refused. Millions went hungry.

The Food and Nutrition Act, which governs SNAP, states “Assistance under this program SHALL be furnished to all eligible households who make application for such participation.”

It is illegal to deliberately withhold benefits from people that qualify for SNAP.