Last week, Roll Call ran a singularly hilarious story under a singularly hilarious headline. It will be a blessed day in our politics when we’ve seen that last reporter fall for the bushwah about how Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin, is a sympathetic friend of America’s poor.

On Thursday, under Ryan’s enthusiastic quasi-leadership, the House of Representatives added some very dark humor to the mix. It also demonstrated quite clearly that cruelly holding children hostage to cheap politics is an article of conservative Republican faith that did not begin at the Texas border with the current president*. From NPR:

The $867 billion package renews the safety net for farmers across the country, but also includes tougher work requirements for recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Program or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps…The measure restricts who is eligible to receive aid and also requires millions of Americans who receive food through government assistance to work 20 hours per week, enroll in job training programs or be cut off from those benefits. Democrats have been relentless in their opposition to the changes to SNAP, arguing the new provisions are cruel and will cause food insecurity for millions of Americans. Republicans say the program has grown far too large and is unsustainable. Imposing job requirements, they argue, will promote self-sufficiency, push people into the workforce and help lower the number of people on government assistance.

Ryan, who went through high school and college on federal assistance—you’re welcome, dude—once again ran his rap about how food stamps are bad because everybody on federal assistance (except him, of course) is damaged by it. These changes, he said, with practiced duplicity, would:

“...close the skills gap, better equip our workforce, and encourage people to move from welfare to work, so more Americans have the opportunity to tap into the economic prosperity we’re seeing right now.”

(Ryan’s family came to this country from Ireland during the Great Famine. Historian Liam Hogan has an interesting thread on the electric Twitter machine about how what Ryan says about America’s poor echoes back through time to what the British press and the British authorities said about the starving Irish of that time.)

The farm bill passed by two votes and most of its most draconian provisions are DOA in the Senate, where the Democrats still have some influence. Still, it’s a look into the other half of the conservative Republican house of horrors as regards poor children who don’t look like Paul Ryan—and a helluva lot who do, most of them in rural areas that went strongly for the president*. This is Paul Ryan and his House majority leveraging millions of poor children for a tax cut, a better deal in the Senate, and to keep faith with a president* who could care less. At least those kids aren’t in cages, except metaphorical ones. They are free-range children.

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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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