there’s a whole swath of the urban center right that’s just totally unprepared for this new cohort of detail oriented policy nerd candidates and keeps shooting themselves in the foot

Yeah, in this case the people of e.g. Salt Lake City, who have meaningfully distinct lives from the people in the surrounding countryside.

House representatives aren't elected at large, they're intended to represent specific territorial districts.

Divisions between districts should represent to the greatest extent possible meaningful geographic divisions within the state.

I'm assuming without even looking that Salt Lake City is blue and basically everywhere else is deep red. IMHO it undermines representative democracy to mix Salt Lake City territory across multiple districts when that doesn't reflect the reality of Utah politics.

Should national shifts in mood affect what happens in a territorially small district within a specific state?

Surely what matters is whether Utah's representatives represent Utah's mood.

I don't think my town even has a mid bakery. It has a "bakery" that sells treats and espresso. Where's the bread, I ask it.

If the reality of Utah is that the state has a big pocket of deep blue votes in a sea of deep red votes, then a 3-1 outcome in the legislature reflects the truth.

We should be profoundly satisfied with that outcome and dismissive of other considerations.

IIRC roughly half of SNAP recipients are Republican voters. Setting aside for a moment the question of whether it would have been morally or strategically acceptable, the leverage arises *after* GOP politicians touch the stove, not before.

I am very familiar with that world myself. I've worked with people who grew up eating catfood and were babysat by being locked in a dryer.

It's still very, very hard to starve to death.

It's difficult after the last 10 months of news out of the White House to take "it's already committed money, there's nothing we can do" seriously.

I get it, you can conjure up a very specific person who's so functionally limited that they're unable to take any step to connect with an alternate food source, but it's easier to conjure hypothetical people who will die because they just lost their health insurance.

How do those people at present get their SNAP card? You have to posit a bare minimum level of functionality even at present just for them to be interacting with the current system.

$1.8 trillion is considerably more than the tens of billions of dollars you claim are required to keep everyone fed.

All kinds of things would derail in a long federal shutdown, nobody's suggesting otherwise - air travel was about to seize up and die - but starvation is not an imminent consequence.

"Going hungry" is different than "starving to death". I emphasize again because it is very important to do so when the risk thereof is being used to justify major political decisions that "starving to death" is really, really hard to do.

The total combined expenditures of all 50 states and their municipalities is in the order of $2.9 trillion. Tens of billions per year isn't a lot of money, and "enormous waste" is moving the goalpost from "people will starve to death".

State and municipal budgets is the pretty obvious answer to me. If you believe that risk is too great to be worth taking, that's a morally coherent position, but then this shutdown and all future shutdowns are political theater because the GOP knows exactly how to make you submit.

Right, and if SNAP fails to the point where people are starving, you are demonstrating that a network of regional food banks exists to fill the gap if given adequate funding.

There's more than enough food. State budgets could pick up the slack. Dying of starvation is really hard to do.

This is definitely the kind of response that suggests you're a smart guy who's thought things through.