Via TPM:

In a surprising move Tuesday, six Republicans joined Senate Democrats to break a filibuster and advance a three-month revival of unemployment insurance that recently expired for some 1.3 million Americans.

On the off-chance that you’re wondering, Roy Blunt, our Republican Senator from Missouri was not among the Republicans who were at least willing to discuss putting the welfare of jobless Americans before partisan ideology – in spite of the fact that, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Tony Messenger points out, people don’t have jobs because there aren’t any to be had:

Both liberal and conservative economists point out that the long-term unemployment problem is as bad as it’s been since after World War II. Kevin Hassett, an economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute and former adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, calls it “a huge emergency.”

So far, two days later, there’s no statement from Blunt – that I can find, at any rate – explaining his vote, so we’ll have to extrapolate for the time being from his past rhetoric and his predictable willingness to always toe the party line. My guess is that he’ll make some half-hearted statement that repeats one or the other of the strategies many in his party are adopting to try to take the sting out of their heartlessness: to wit, unemployment benefits somehow hurt the jobless, discourage full-employment, and that fiscal responsibility demands spending offsets.

The last reason, the demand for spending offsets, is especially risible. When Democrats in the House did, during the original budget negotiations, offer to pay for extending unemployment benefits by cutting agriculture subsidies – those very subsidies enjoyed by our Missouri Rep. Vicky Hartzler, incidentally – that wasn’t the type of spending cut that Republicans were willing to accept.

But there are, of course, other types of corporate welfare that could be cut in order to pay for extending jobless benefits. Oil subsidies, for instance. I’m going to be waiting with baited breath for Senator Blunt’s effort to excuse his vote(s). If I hear one word about fiscal responsibility from Senator “Big Oil” Blunt, the go-to guy for the energy industry who thinks oil subsidies, along with other types of corporate welfare are always just tickety-boo, I’ll spit. And if anyone buys this crap coming from Blunt, I might suffer cardiac arrest. Why not? Who wants to live in a world where folks are so stupid that they’ll buy Roy Blunt as a fiscal conservative?

In fact, who wants to live in a world where anyone buys the GOP as the party of fiscal responsibility? Spending offsets are simply a strategy designed to deflect disapproval and disguise a turnip as cake – as in let them eat cake. There’s a reason that the House leadership is trying to soften GOP rhetoric on the topic.  But no matter how they talk about it, it’s hard to make meanness attractive. As Brian Buetler notes in Salon:

But conservatives – even reform conservatives – are oddly indignant about the suggestion that they would support doing something that actually helps the poor. As always, for any given way of helping people, conservatives are against it because there’s some other better way. But they never actually favor helping.

Today the House of Representatives voted 217-210 to cut $39 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). All the House Democrats and 15 Republicans voted against the cuts. None of the 15 Republicans were from Missouri.

As House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) noted, “Every person who votes for this Republican measure is voting to hurt his or her own constituents.” For a Missouri perspective on Pelosi’s comment consider that 15% of Missouri’s population – about 933,000 people – are expected to receive SNAP benefits in 2014. SNAP funding in Missouri in 2014 is already due to be diminished by $96 million when temporary funding from the  2009 Recovery Act expires on November 1. The bill our Missouri GOPers voted for today will take an additional $40 billion from the entire program over the next 10 years – pushing 4 and 6 million people across the U.S. out of the program. Be assured the new cuts will hit Missouri hard. The U.S. Department of Agriculture ranks Missouri second in the nation in percentage of households with “very low food security.”

SNAP aid is usually included in the farm bill. It was separated out this year so that a bill with hefty agricultural subsidies could be passed without wrangling with the Senate about the SNAP cuts that killed an earlier effort at a Farm Bill. Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-4), a Missouri farmer who manages to pull in plenty of those agricultural handouts, indicated that she was going to vote to cut food aid because:

“This bill helps people get back to work,” Hartzler said. “It also cuts down on the waste, fraud and abuse in the SNAP program.”

You read it right. According to Hartzler – and other GOP bozos who are attempting to put a good face on their votes today – starvation creates jobs.

Sorry, Vicky, no matter what you try to make us believe, we don’t have 7.1% unemployment in Missouri because folks are lazy. There aren’t enough jobs to go around – thanks to the Bush recession that GOP ideologues like Hartzler helped engineer. Actually, given the fact that the minimum wage hovers around $7, there are plenty of working folks whose families won’t eat without SNAP aid.  KOMU in Columbia quoted a man named Jack Bhutod whose situation is all too common:

I’m supporting a family of three on a low wage job and we can’t afford the food we need without food stamps, … “Hunger is not a game for us. We need to eat.

As for fraud, if it were really a problem, then Hartzler’s GOP fellow-traveler, Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), wouldn’t have had to tell overt lies in order to try to make that case. Food stamp fraud rates are among the lowest of any federal program.

So fraud and lazy lay-abouts aren’t don’t pose real problems.  But no matter – we should give our Missouri GOPers some leeway . Most of them probably don’t really understand too much about hunger since almost all of them have an average net worth well above a million dollars (see also here). Nor do they really have to be too concerned about constituents who are in a daily struggle with hunger. Poor people, after all,  aren’t the folks who pay the campaign bills.  

Rep. George Miller (D-CA) today issued a report identifying fourteen Republican representatives who voted – are you ready – to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits from the farm bill while retaining massive agricultural subsidies they themselves receive. Collectively, the fourteen GOP piggies:

Have a total net worth of up to $124.5million;

Have received a total of at least $7.2 million in farm subsidies;

Each previously voted to gut the SNAP program by giving states large financial incentives to kick families off SNAP.

A charter member of the GOP’s pork swilling fourteen: Missouri’s Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-4). Her federally-financed take: $516,000; her total worth: somewhere between $2,218,026 and $13,854,995; the number of constituents in her home county, Cass County, who receive SNAP benefits: 8,664 or 9%. According to Rep. Hartzler, the House approved farm bill:

… secures a safe, affordable, and plentiful food supply by improving agricultural programs to be cost-effective and market-oriented.

“This Farm Bill saves taxpayer dollars by eliminating direct subsidies and payments to those who don’t farm,” said Hartzler. “In place of direct payments, farmers will have access to a low-lying safety net that offers assistance only after significant losses are suffered as a result of extreme droughts, floods, or adverse market conditions. This ensures American consumers won’t have to be dependent on foreign countries for our food. A safe, affordable food supply is vital to the national security of this great nation.”

However, as usual, Hartzler’s not telling us the whole story:

Republicans tried to claim that the passage of the farm provisions was done to help family farms, but this Farm Bill is loaded with pork and handouts for the wealthy and corporations. Farmers with incomes over $250,000 will receive one third of the crop insurance money. This Republican House passed windfall for millionaires and corporations comes at a time when net farm income is projected to reach it highest level since 1973.

Hartzler does try to weasel out of taking responsibility for redistributing wealth upwards, claiming that cutting direct subsidies to farmers who take land out of production while providing federally funded insurance subsidies to big agricultural interests constitutes a significant fiscal “reform.” As Lisa Ritland of the Denver Post put it, “While ending one egregious subsidy program, direct payments, a new potentially larger taxpayer giveaway was created.”

It’s clear who benefits here, but who gets hurt?:

… the typical household receiving aid under the farm bill through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has a gross monthly income of only $744, and their average monthly SNAP benefit-which every member detailed in this report voted against extending- is just $281.

Nor are the recipients the worthless “takers” that make the GOP and their supporters go rabid with self-righteous, tax-payer rage:

House Republicans aren’t starving able bodied poor people. Forty five percent of food stamp recipients are children. Twenty percent of recipients are disabled, and 8.5% are elderly. These aren’t healthy working age adults mooching off the system. They are the most vulnerable members of our society.

So, to recap, Children will go without food while millionaire Vicky Hartzler continues to lives the good life, pulling in the funds that should be supporting our much-vaunted safety net. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired to death of subsidizing the likes of the self-serving Rep. Hartzler.  

Rep. Vicky Hartzler’s (R-4) big on cutting wasteful spending – except when it effects Vicky Hartzler. Remember how after  going on and on about “reckless and runaway” government spending, she still dug in her heels and said no,no, no, when she had a chance to cut wasteful agricultural subsidies? Seems she liked the more than $750,000  she and her family collected while on the government agricultural dole.

Now, after still more spouting off about cutting the fat out of government, Vicky’s at it again – making profuse use of government “franking” privileges to send out glossy flyers trumpeting her work in Congress. Hartzler is one of the ten biggest spenders in the U.S. House of Representatives when it comes to tax-payer funded mailings, having, over a nine-month period, spent $253,156.

This is the same Vicky Hartzler who, as Think Progress notes, uses her Website to call for “a freeze on discretionary spending except for our national defense, including veterans, Medicare, and Social Security.”

But hey – remember how Hartzler excused “some” agricultural subsidies as essential for “national security” purposes? She now claims that her use of the franking privilege to send out mailers isn’t really wasteful because:

After 34 years of leadership by [the district’s previous Congressman, Rep. Ike Skelton (D)], we feel like it’s important for me [sic] people to get to know me and for me to hear from them. It’s part of serving the people that you represent is to communicate with them, and that’s always been a priority of mine.

Well, gee willikers!  Since it’s her priority …  what can I say?