Support SNAP! Or, Hungry For History

This week, I'm joining with many politicians, advocates, and SNAP supporters in Massachusetts to take the SNAP Challenge, to live on $4.56 per day for food, all week long (the state average for recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as Food Stamps).  Also, no eating out, and no beer.  No, not even a homebrew.  Then, we hashtag stuff like #MASNAPChallenge, #supportSNAP, and #ihatehashtags, and #hashbrowns.

Why?

And it all has to do with farmers.

Now, I love farmers and farms.  The highlight of the summer for my daughter is going to farm camp (which I'm pretty sure is me paying the farm to use her as free labor, but I'll let that go).  We love our CSA, and farmers markets.  Farms are great!

Farming runs in the family.

So what do farms have to do with the food stamp program?

I’m glad you asked.  Or, I’m glad I pretended that you asked, for rhetorical purposes.

Starting during the Great Depression, Congress created the Farm Bill, designed to help farmers by protecting them from instabilities in crop markets.  This help has taken different forms over the years, including low interest loans, crop insurance, subsidies, etc.  The original Farm Bill wanted to also help farmers by guaranteeing consumers would buy their food, so it had built into it subsidies for people who couldn't afford to buy the food farmers were producing.  This was the beginning of the Food Stamp program, which would later become SNAP.  And every five years, SNAP is reauthorized and refunded as part of the Farm Bill.

The last Farm Bill was from 2013, and it is set to expire in September.

Congress in writing the new Farm Bill right now.  And they have some ideas about how to "improve" it.

Because SNAP is aimed at helping people with little money to spend, it is seen as a welfare program, a way for lazy Americans to live off the government’s dime, when they should be starving in the street like characters from a Dickens novel.

The biggest challenge to SNAP from the Republican-controlled House is a massive budget cut, coupled with an increase to work requirements.  All of which is aimed at kicking people off of the program for being lazy. Except most of them work already. And don’t get me started about work requirements for food benefits.

Oh, see, too late.  You got me started.

Picture it: Ireland 1845.

Beautiful country. Full of farms that grew wheat and barley, raised cattle for dairy and meat. Irish butter was prized over in Britain, tons of the stuff exported every year.  And those big farms were almost all owned by English landlords, who employed Irish laborers to work the fields. The English had learned some decades ago that a curious vegetable the Spanish had brought back from South America, the potato, was the perfect thing to encourage the Irish to grow for their own food.  Because it required very little land, but provided enough yield for Irish families.  Which was good for the English, who wanted to keep as much land as possible to themselves.

Let me repeat one part of that: The potato came from South America, through Spain, before it made its way to Ireland, pushed on them by the English so the could be kept (barely) above starvation, just healthy enough to work the fields. There is no traditional Irish food involving potatoes.

Like to be clear about that. That point gets lost on lots of Americans.

So 1845 rolls along and something odd happens to the potato crop. Part of it fails on account of some kind of fungus. Darn shame, it’ll be a tough winter, but next year will be better.  Except next year wasn’t better.  This was the beginning of what we now call the Irish Potato Famine, because we’re not in Ireland.  In Ireland, it is called simply the Great Hunger.  And it caused great hunger indeed for the Irish, up to a million of whom starved to death during those years, with millions more fleeing Ireland to other places where food was more available, most notably America.

But calling it the Irish Potato Famine is just the right description, because it gets across the necessary information.  It was a potato famine, which affected the Irish.  Exclusively.  The only crop that failed was the potato.  And because of English policies to make the potato the staple of the Irish diet, the only people who suffered were the poor Irish, who could not afford to buy any other food.

Because make no mistake, there was PLENTY of food being grown and produced in Ireland during the entire period of the famine, almost all of which was being export to England, to be sold for profit.  While the Irish starved to death.

This is the picture of a real person named Bridget O'Donnell, with her children, during the famine.
It is not, as you might think, part of a Walking Dead prequel.

There were, early on and to the credit of certain English government officials, attempts to help the Irish, mostly by importing American corn to feed the hungry.  Yeah, I’m not sure why, either, but that’s what they did.  They exported Irish food and imported American food.  But at least they tried to help.  But then, there was an election, and as sometimes happens in election, the balance of political power shifted.  And the new administration in London banned further imports of food and refused to give food to the people who were dying from a lack of it.

Instead, they demanded that food should only be given to those who could work for it. Put in a day's worth of labor, receive just enough for a day’s meal.  But so many people showed up to work that there weren’t enough jobs, so starving men were set out to the middle of nowhere, to build roads that served no purpose, just to force them to work so they could be justified in being paid enough to not starve.  And if they happened to not have the money to pay the men immediately? Too bad for the laborers, who would continue to starve, but still be forced to work, now for no pay. Men died on these roads, owed a weeks wage and without any food in their bellies.
Those roads, built by starving laborers, and serving no purpose whatsoever, are the Famine Roads, and you can still find them all over Ireland.

No one of Irish descent (which, according to everyone on St. Patrick’s Day, is EVERYONE), who knows anything of this dark chapter in Irish history (which is now all of you) can possibly support work requirements for a food program without abandoning your morality and your humanity. 

Food is a human right.  Saying you can’t have it because you’re not working hard enough to deserve food is, at best, a crime against humanity.

And that is what the Congress of the United States is debating.  Seems like it should be a short debate.  Instead, you get this: “No more loopholes that create disincentives to work.”

I can almost hear the esteemed Senator Ebenezer Scrooge, pronouncing, “Have me no prisons?  No workhouses?  Those who are badly off must go there.  And if they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

You want to get people working?  Great!  Have a nation-wide, well-funded job training program.  But don’t tie it to getting enough food to not go hungry.  Don’t punish people who are poor for being poor.  And don’t blame them for it, either.  You want more people lifted out of poverty?  Great!  So do I!  Raise the minimum wage!  But don’t blame poverty on laziness, demand work for the right to eat, all the while doing nothing about the fact that no one can survive on low wage jobs, even working full-time.

The Farm Bill is trying to force the debate in the wrong direction, and we need to speak up about the right direction it needs to be going in.  And that is what the SNAP Challenge is meant help do.  To remind us that we all have a voice, and we all have stake in this, and we're all, all of us, in need of some help every once in a while.  And most of all, food is a human right.  

(It really is.   It’s even in the Declaration of Independence. “And are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”)

(No, I’m not talking about the Pursuit of Happiness, though food does make me happy.  I’d stick it more in the “Life” category.)

So enough with the history lesson.  Call Congress.  #SupportSNAP.

And #hashbrowns.

The Ghost of James Madison

Seems like our nation is headed (dare I say...again) toward a Constitutional Crisis.  The President, in the midst of an investigation into his campaign for the White House, has started tweeting some rather surprising things about the scope of the Constitution and the office of the presidency, including the idea that the president cannot be prosecuted because he can pardon anyone he wants, including himself.  There's only one thing to do at a time like this.

Let me introduce you to some more members of my family.

The Irish side?  No, they deserve their own post.  Indeed, they deserve their own ballad, as I regale you with songs of the Hurley brothers and their bar, or the Irish immigrant you joined the army and volunteered to fight the Germans in World War I just to gain his citizenship.

Nope, we're going back to Virginia for this one.

I've already introduced you to my great-great-great Virginian grandfathers Joseph Pavy and John Self III.  But I've only just begun.

You see John Self was also married to Sarah "Sally" Pavy, who was the niece of Joseph Pavy.

Our families were very...um...close.

Anywhooo, Sally was the daughter of Joseph Pavy's brother, John Pavy, who was married to a woman named Jane.  Jane happened to be the daughter of a guy named Samuel Madison, who was the son of Ambrose Madison, who was the son of Henry Madison.  Henry was the brother of another Ambrose Madison, who happens to be the grandfather of James Madison, Jr.

You know, the father of the Constitution and the fourth president of United States.

This guy.

I know, it was a long walk.  So, I'm not descended from this guy, but at the very least, I should be getting an invite to the family reunion.

And at said family reunion, I think Jemmie and I will get along famously.  We're both a little on the nerdy side (the history books don't mention this, but he was a huge trekkie), and neither of us got our faces put on money (yet).  And I think he would have some interesting things to say on several recent subjects.  With the help of powers from beyond the grave, I will now summon the ghost of my relative, the man who created the form of government that we are still united under, President James Madison.

Yes?

Oh, hi.  Wasn't expecting this to work.  How's the afterlife?

Terrible.  Jefferson and Hamilton are still getting all the attention.

So, I don't know if you've been following what's been going on, or are even aware of Twitter, but--

Yeah, the President is claiming he has the power to pardon himself to avoid impeachment and prison.  This is what happens when you stop teaching ancient Greek in schools.

So, can he?

The idea is both ridiculous and repugnant.  Let me explain this in the simplest terms.  The Constitution is pretty clear on this matter.

I even blogged about it

The President cannot use his pardon power to save himself from impeachment.  Article II, Section 2 clearly says that the President has the Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.  End of story.

Why all the capital letters?

They looked nicer in cursive.

But he could still pardon himself to keep himself out of prison, right?

No.

But several legal scholars say he can.

Who are you going to believe?  Some random legal nerds, or the supreme legal nerd?  I'm the Ghost of James Freakin' Madison!

Look, we never intended to make the President immune from the law.  Rather, we allowed that the President cannot be prosecuted for criminal offenses while in office, but maintained that he be subject to such courts once out of office.  If he is impeached, and then removed from the presidency, the law will continue to apply to him and he can be prosecuted.

So he could pardon himself for that?

No. Because once he is removed from office, before he is tried in a criminal court, he's no longer President and has no pardon powers.

But he could pardon himself while still President, if he knew he was guilty and liking to be impeached, right?  Like Ford did for Nixon, before he could be brought up on charges, only he'd do it to himself.  That's at least possible, isn't it?

When I wrote the Constitution--

You didn't actually write the whole Constitution.  There was a convention.  Lot of people contributed.

I know what I did.  I was there.  Very well.  When I guided the structure of the Constitution...  Good enough?

I'll allow it.

I had two key concepts that I knew would make all the difference for this new republic.  The first was that sovereignty must not lie with the individuals states, or else true union would be impossible.  The power must lie in a strong centralized national government, a government which derives its power from the will of the people that it governs.

The second concepts is the no man should be King here.  No one is above the law.  All must be equal before the law, and the law, created by the people that are in turn governed by it, shall be the highest authority.  To give anyone the ability to pardon his own crimes would be to place him above the law, and that is unconstitutional.  To even suggest it is treason.  Only the most guilty, the most seditious, most power-hungry of evil men would even attempt such a thing.  Yet, he is welcome try.  I believe that my Constitution, with all its flaws and all its amendments, will stand the test of even that.

It's managed pretty well for 231 years.  Let the Pumpkinhead of the United States try to up-end it.