Republicans

[Disagreeable]

continue to balance the budget on the backs of the elderly, poor, and children while they continue to give tax breaks to the wealthy. Hopefully, voters are paying attention. Excerpts, link below; my emphasis.

"The food stamp measure is just one of several provisions in an expansive congressional budget-cutting package that critics say unfairly targets the poor and disadvantaged, especially poor children.

The battle will be joined today when the House Budget Committee is scheduled to fold eight budget-cutting bills saving $50 billion through 2010 into a single measure and then send it to the floor for a vote next week. The Senate is also set to vote on its version of the budget-cutting package, which would not cut food stamps. The smaller measure, with $39 billion in savings, has broad reach, affecting Medicare, Medicaid, agriculture programs, private pension plans and energy.

The Senate action will feature a showdown over a bid to open Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, as well as confrontations over limits to agriculture subsidies, Medicaid payments and Hurricane Katrina relief.

The food stamp cuts in the House measure would knock nearly 300,000 people off nutritional assistance programs, including 70,000 legal immigrants, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Those immigrants would lose their benefits because the House measure would require legal immigrants to live in the United States for seven years before becoming eligible to receive food stamps, rather than the current five years."

"About 40,000 children would lose eligibility for free or reduced-price school lunches, the CBO estimated.'

"But some Republicans worry that social service cuts, though relatively small, might have outsized political ramifications, especially when Republicans move in the coming weeks to cut taxes for the fifth time in as many years. Those tax cuts, totaling $70 billion over five years, would more than offset the deficit reduction that would result from the budget cuts."

Before you start screaming about LEGAL immigrants being cut off from food stamps, the vast majority of people affected, 230,000, are not immigrants.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/02/AR2005110203007.html

 

[jodywy]

and one of those tax cut would be making the death tax -elimination permanent ... I hope!

 

[wdcook]

Do tell, oh one whose name so aptly fits, just where in the US Constitution is the authority granted to the federal government to spend one single dime on food stamps for anybody? Here's a hot tip. It isn't there.

 

[passin thru]

Thank You Thank You
Something that is rarely mentioned (Constitution) and should be used for these governmental decisions all the time.

Thank you for your voice of reason.

 

[TSR]

Do tell, oh one whose name so aptly fits, just where in the US Constitution is the authority granted to the federal government to spend one single dime on food stamps for anybody? Here's a hot tip. It isn't there.

Its there in Article 1 section 8 of the Constitution, the last sentence, or at least that is the way the Supreme Court has interpreted. Naturally it doesn't say anything about Food Stamps they weren't in existence then but it does give Congress the power to make all laws necessary to....... or at least as I said earlier that is the way the Supreme Court has interpreted this clause. Not saying I necessarily agree but thats the way it is.

 

[wdcook]

James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, elaborated upon this limitation in a letter to James Robertson:
With respect to the two words "general welfare," I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators. If the words obtained so readily a place in the "Articles of Confederation," and received so little notice in their admission into the present Constitution, and retained for so long a time a silent place in both, the fairest explanation is, that the words, in the alternative of meaning nothing or meaning everything, had the former meaning taken for granted.
In 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object saying, "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
-- James Madison, 4 Annals of congress 179 (1794)
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated."
--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Albert Gallatin, 1817

 

[wdcook]

Link; http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/articles/00/elected.html Franklin Pierce, our 14th president, took actions that would be political suicide today. In 1854, he vetoed a bill to help the mentally ill saying, "I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity," adding that to approve such spending, "would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."

In 1887, President Grover Cleveland, our 22nd and 24th president, said when vetoing an appropriation to help drought-stricken counties in Texas, "I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan to indulge in benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds . . . I find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution."