Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program

Floor Speech

Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, today, the House of Representatives is voting on legislation dealing with the farm bill and food stamps. Recently--this week--the House of Representatives broke with 40 years of tradition, precedent, common sense, and perhaps human decency when it bowed to partisan politics and passed a farm bill without a nutrition title. They pulled apart what traditionally urban and rural interests have done in this country: coming together to pass a farm bill, connecting it with a nutrition title, where it served rural America, it served urban America, it was good for hungry kids, it was good for economic development, it was good for conservation and the environment.

The House leadership has announced that later today--sometime this afternoon--the House will vote on a bill that would cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, by nearly $40 billion. They are taking up this bill because the $20 billion in punitive SNAP cuts they failed to pass earlier this year was not enough for the majority. They do not only cut $20 billion--$20 billion, $20,000 million--$20 billion in cuts, when the average family gets $4.45 per day. Cutting $20 billion was bad enough. That was not good enough for those Members of the House of Representatives who want to see cuts twice as big. Many of those Members of the House of Representatives--or at least some of them--are farmers themselves who get huge farm subsidies. It begs the issue a little bit.

For some of my colleagues who have seen the movie ``Lincoln,'' at one point, President Lincoln--listening, but perhaps not entirely hearing his staff, who exhorted him to spend more time in the White House, winning the war, freeing the slaves, preserving the Union--President Lincoln said: I need to go out and get my public opinion baths.

Well, I suggest that maybe more of us--those particularly who are voting to cut SNAP, to cut food stamps $40 billion--they may want to go out and listen to what people--not dressed like this, not working around here who get good benefits and decent salaries, not highly paid Congressmen and Senators, not the lobbyists who they may brunch with on Sunday when those Members do not go back home--but go out and talk to somebody at a labor union hall, go out and talk to somebody in a shopping mall, go out and talk to somebody at a school, where children--I heard a story today at my weekly coffee, where a woman told us that her daughter, who teaches in Columbus, has seen during the school lunch program children take some of the food and put it in their pockets so they can take it home for their brothers and sisters or for the weekend or for their moms or dads.

In this still difficult economy--when people receive $4.45 per day, on the average, for SNAP, for food stamps--people in the House of Representatives want to cut it nearly $40 billion.

It was not enough that 2 million Americans could lose SNAP benefits. It was not enough to them in the first bill that more than 200,000 children could lose access to the free and reduced-price lunch program. They want to make it harder, and they can say whatever they want. They can say: Well, people--I don't know. Do they get addicted to food stamps? Do they dig food stamps because they don't want to work?

The fact is, as Chairwoman Stabenow points out, the chair of the Agriculture Committee, in the next 10 years, 14 million Americans will leave SNAP. Why is that? If we do not do this, why will 14 million people leave SNAP? Because they will get better-paying jobs because they do not want to be in SNAP. Most people who get stamps would rather not. They would rather have enough food on the table. They would rather have enough purchasing power to go to the grocery store and buy food with their own money that they have earned so they can bring that food home and serve their children. That is what most people want to do.

I spoke to a woman in Hamilton, OH, some time ago who told me that early in the month she would occasionally take her 9-year-old son to McDonald's or to another fast food restaurant--maybe once in the first week of the month.

The second week, she could maybe serve him a hamburger, she could serve him meat. The third week of the month, she began to scrape. This is a woman who had a full-time job, volunteered, taught Sunday School, volunteered with the Cub Scouts for her son, was a very devoted single mother. The fourth week of the month, what typically happened was--she looked at me with her blues and she said: You know, I say to my son--I was sitting there with my son that last week of the month.

He said: Mom, how come you are not eating?

She said: Well, I am just not hungry.

Well, she was hungry; she just had to choose at the end of the month, does the money go for my son or does it go for me? Like most mothers and fathers, she chose to do it for her child. That is the backdrop.

If more of my colleagues would follow the admonition of Abraham Lincoln and go out and get a public opinion bath and listen to what real people are saying--not people who dress like this, not people who sit in Congress, not lobbyists who may buy them lunch and come to their fundraisers, but really listen to what people have to say about what this means and understand, as Presiding Officer knows from the work he has done in his State of Connecticut, that most of the people getting benefits are children. Eighty-five percent of people receiving food assistance are children or their parents or people with disabilities or seniors. Many of them have jobs, but their jobs pay $9 an hour. Again, this is not something they do by choice in a great majority of cases; it is something they feel they have to do. They are mothers and fathers who get up in the morning and try to give their children a better future. These are millions of Americans who head out every day looking for work so they can pay their bills and put food on the table.

As I said, almost 90 percent--80-some percent of SNAP households are made up of seniors and the disabled and families with children. One out of six Americans worries about where their next meal is coming from--one out of six Americans. How many people in this body have ever really thought that way, have talked to people that way, have tried to put themselves in the place of the--that is 50, 60, 70 percent of Americans--one out of six who worries about where their next meal will come from.

Then we have the body down the hall, the House of Representatives, who voted--$20 billion in cuts is not enough; let's do $40 billion. Maybe we will do more than that.

My colleagues in the Congress suggest that SNAP participation has grown too big. They bemoan the state of our economy, the still-too-high unemployment rate. We all do. I share that concern. But we must do more to help jump-start our economy. I will work with anyone who seeks to do so. We know how important these benefits are to our brothers and sisters from Cleveland to Cincinnati, from rural Appalachia to farmlands in western Ohio, all across this country. It is important that we stand strong. We need a farm bill. We need a farm bill that serves agriculture. We need a farm bill that serves rural development. We need a farm bill that serves conservation and the environment. We need a farm bill that helps us provide energy. We need a farm bill that provides nutrition assistance.

I yield the floor.

Source