Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan, the One Tough Nerd of campaigns past whose approach to Running The Government Like A Business helped turn the water in Flint into a chemistry set, is still Running Government Like A Business—which should be obvious to anyone who's ever had any contact with cable companies, health insurance firms, or payday lenders out by the airport.

The latest evidence comes from The Detroit Free Press.

Walter Barry, a 46-year-old mentally disabled Detroit man who lives with his mother, lost his public assistance when his name turned up in a fugitive database: His brother had stolen his name and used it as an alias when he was arrested about 25 years ago. Identity theft victim Donitha Copeland, a onetime homeless woman, lost her food benefits when her name showed up in the same database: There was an outstanding warrant for her arrest for writing bad checks in Kalamazoo, though she had never been there. Kenneth Anderson, a disabled 58-year-old man who requires oxygen 24 hours a day, lost his food assistance, too, because of an arrest warrant involving a nephew—not him.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals looked at these cases and found something amiss. Namely, that Michigan's Fugitive Felon Law, which was employed to cut some 20,000 people off public assistance, was so badly administered that it couldn't tell Shirley Booth from John Wilkes.

"His story ... well illustrates the difficulties that the bare-bones Michigan system can produce," the 6th Circuit wrote in its 12-page opinion, which upheld a lower court ruling that had declared Michigan's policy as unconstitutional. At issue in the case is the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), more commonly known as food stamps, which bans people from receiving benefits who have fled prosecution for a felony. In an effort to catch such scofflaws, the State of Michigan in 2013 developed an automated program that compares the list of public-assistance recipients with a list of outstanding felony warrants maintained by the law enforcement information network. In 2015, U.S. District Judge Judith Levy struck down the state's database, concluding it wrongfully denied plaintiffs of their right to food aid because they were neither actively fleeing or avoiding prosecution for a felony.

It's not so much the mean-spiritedness of this kind of thing, but the faceless bureaucratic indifference to human suffering that is imported into the political commonwealth when doughheads like Snyder decide that it should be Run Like A Business.

The lead plaintiff is Walter Barry, a mentally disabled man who lives in Detroit with his mother, Elaine Barry. In 2012, he was awarded $186 per month in food assistance, but later that year he learned that his benefits would be cut because of a "criminal justice disqualification." His mother requested a hearing with state authorities and took Barry to the Detroit Police Department, where his fingerprints were taken. Police found he had no criminal history. An administrative law judge quickly reinstated Barry's benefits. Five months later, the same problem occurred. Barry received notice that his benefits would be terminated because of a criminal issue. In May 2013, a Michigan Department of Health and Human Services employee said she had "personally verified" through a LEIN check that Walter had an outstanding felony arrest warrant dating to 1989 by the Detroit police. It turned out that the outstanding warrant at issue was really for Barry's brother, who had stolen Barry's name and used it an alias when he was arrested about 25 years earlier. The problem didn't go away, however. The warrant kept showing up in Barry's name, even though it wasn't him. His mother made repeat visits to the police station. Barry's fingerprints were taken over and over again. A police officer gave four statements that Barry had no criminal history. But his name kept turning up in the state's system as a fugitive who was not entitled to food benefits.

I guarantee you that his administration didn't give a damn if Walter Barry was innocent as long as the numbers of people on assistance went down, just as they didn't care what was in the water in Flint as long as they could show that some ledger somewhere showed a decrease in public spending. And, yes, if you noticed that there is a great similarity between what happened with the SNAP program here and the use of the same kind of technology to purge the rolls of inconvenient voters in places like Florida, you are not alone.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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