Unless you’ve been living in a pecan shell (hey, it’s fall, right?), you’ve probably heard that the most devastating and longest lasting shutdown in the history of shutdowns throughout history has finally come to an end.
(Yes, I’m aware that the above paragraph was terribly written. It was intentional. Just like the shutdown was.)
Despite the blame being laid at the feet of the Republicans in Congress, the fact that the country had to be put through this particular budgetary ringer was over subsidies for premiums for the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, that were put into place when the government lost its mind and shut down the country during the pandemic.
Many senators voting against funding government claimed that all Americans deserved access to affordable health care, so that meant subsidies and tax credits needed to be in there, and 15 times in a row the bill was held up. To try to get those measures in there, conservative-minded politicians were painted as super jerks because SNAP benefits, which were part of the continuing resolution, weren’t being paid and people were starving.
In the end, the funding measure was passed without the extra bells and whistles.
So, what was the point? Was this to show the sitting president of the country that his agenda is meaningless, and his political opponents will stop at nothing to shut him down? That has been the modus operandi of the last 10 months. Shutdowns and lawsuits have really put this country behind the 8 ball over a power struggle.
Was this about solving the health care crisis? Nope, not in my view. The reason that Obamacare was enacted in the first place, as they were so wont to tell you, was to solve the health care crisis. As is always the case with government programs, it wasn’t the solution, and things needed to be cobbled on and changed and added and subsidized and boom de yada, it is in a never-ending cycle of fix and fail, and that will continue until government institutes universal or single payer health care.
It was and always will be about control, almost as if our elected representatives have decided that we cannot be trusted with our own destinies.
Using SNAP benefits (and to a lesser extent, air traffic controllers) as a club to try and force the hand of Republicans was a spineless and disingenuous argument, preying on sentiment instead of working on effective legislation. It’s such a shame that people in need were used as pawns in this, which is continuing because the Department of Agriculture may require all SNAP recipients to reapply for benefits.
Secretary Brooke Rollins claimed recently that the Ag Department has identified at least 186,000 dead people still receiving benefits, and half a million recipients are getting two checks per month. So there will probably be sweeping reforms, and that gets laid at the feet of the Senate naysayers (who of course will blame the hard-hearted Republicans).
In all of this, the biggest takeaway I have is that the citizens of this country have become set pieces in a political performance, when in fact, they (and us) should be the lead actors.
Tony Farkas is editor of the Trinity County News-Standard and the San Jacinto News-Times. He can be reached at tony@polkcountypublishing.com.
