Dem
47
GOP
53
Two things quietly happened Saturday that could affect the shutdown—and the midterm elections: SNAP benefits (food stamps) won't be paid and enrollment for the ACA opened. The 42 million people who have EBT cards discovered Saturday that the cards were rejected if they tried to use them to buy food (unless they have some money left over from October, which 97% of beneficiaries do not).
However, on Friday, two federal judges ruled on cases brought by hungry SNAPpers. District Judge John McConnell, a Barack Obama appointee in Rhode Island, ruled that the administration must use the USDA contingency fund to pay out what it has. The administration argued that the $5 billion in that pot is for emergencies caused by nature, not emergencies caused by the administration. In a flood or hurricane, people get much hungrier than in a congressional shutdown, we guess.
In Massachusetts, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, also an Obama appointee, didn't go quite as far. Instead she politely asked the administration to use the emergency fund to at least pay out some money to the SNAP beneficiaries.
However, paying out some money would require changing the software that credits 42 million EBT accounts. Changing the software might not be easy, since the EBT cards are also used by the states and they have multiple private vendors involved in the system. Some of the state systems are decades old and poorly maintained. Getting this done in a few days would require burning a lot of midnight oil. Doing anything new that affects 42 million people across all 50 states and D.C. has to be carefully programmed, verified and tested thoroughly. And given that the administration doesn't want the payments to go out, it has the perfect cover story for delaying implementation of the court orders: We want to make sure we don't make any mistakes.
Donald Trump replied to both rulings by posting to his never-missed-a-meal social media site. He said he would ask his lawyer to ask the judges how to fund SNAP. He also said it could take days, or weeks, to get the machinery of government to start working. If you think Trump is doing this on purpose, well, keep reading.
We are not the only ones who noted what happened Saturday. So did Paul Krugman. He wrote an interesting column on this coincidence. It is entitled "Too Cruel Too Soon." Krugman's point is that Republicans hate SNAP and they also hate the ACA, although which they hate more is in dispute. Both programs take tax money from hardworking "real" Americans and lavish them on undeserving poor people. What could be less American than that? In case you have forgotten what you learned when you read the 900-page Project 2025 report, drastic cuts to both SNAP and the ACA subsidies are a key part of the program. Slashing both programs is very much what Republicans want. It is a lucky accident that both got hit the same day, but the long-term goal was to wipe out both programs.
Republicans fully understand that cutting programs like these will be extremely unpopular with the voters. This is why the BBB backloaded the changes to Medicaid—which will leave millions of people without health insurance—until after the midterms. But they weren't counting on both food and health care coming under fire before the midterms. While the cruelty is fully intentional, the timing is not. It just sort of happened now, when voters will get the chance in a year to register their approval or lack thereof. The current game plan is to blame the Democrats. It will be a tough fight. Generally, when something goes wrong in the country, people blame the president.
The other miscalculation the Republicans made (other than the timing), is who gets hit the hardest. Republicans have the misconception that shutting down SNAP and the ACA subsidies that make the plans affordable will mostly hurt poor Black people in big cities in blue states. Turns out that is not true. They mostly hit poor white people in rural areas of red states—in other words, the Republicans' own base. But urban legends die hard. They would hear about this if they held town halls, but most of them have abandoned meeting with their constituents, lest they get an earful.
So why don't Republicans use the $5 billion USDA emergency fund to pay partial SNAP benefits and look for more sources for the rest? It is a deeply cynical calculation. Many Republicans don't care if people go hungry (even their own voters) but they know Democrats do care. So they are using the SNAP beneficiaries as hostages. They could propose a stand-alone bill to fund SNAP separate from everything else and it would pass in a flash with bipartisan support. Why don't they do that?
Actually, the Republicans in the Senate HAVE proposed such a bill, with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) as the main sponsor of the legislation. There is a competing bill from the Democrats, with the main difference being that the Democrats want to fund WIC in addition to SNAP and Republicans just want to fund SNAP. This could plausibly be worked out; even if the Republicans had to give in on WIC, that would produce less blowback than depriving 42 million people of their SNAP benefits. But Hawley, et al., aren't really pushing very hard, even though it should be pretty easy to hammer something out. Why the halfhearted effort?
Once you think about it, it is obvious. To pass a bill, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) would have to call the House back in session. Then he would have to swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who would promptly be the 218th signature on the discharge petition, forcing the House to vote on a resolution demanding the DoJ to release all the Epstein files. This would make Donald Trump furious. "Republicans want children to go hungry in order to protect pedophiles" sounds like a campaign slogan to us, but we doubt the Democrats will use it.
The best-laid plans of rodents and humans, as carefully described in Project 2025, have gone off the rails. The idea was to mask the cruelty until after the midterms. Instead they are facing a nutrition crisis and a health care crisis well before the midterms. Will the Democrats make hay here?
In the immortal words of Sarah Palin "You betcha." Democrats don't have to emphasize SNAP now. The 42 million people whose EBT cards no longer work will see it themselves very fast. Instead, the Democrats are starting a nationwide blitz on health care, which is more subtle. People using the ACA won't notice that until they look at the 2026 plans, and not everyone will do that immediately. A top Democratic group is launching a six-digit ad campaign. Four hundred canvassing events are being held. Governors are holding press conferences. Town halls are being held. Many Democrats will show up for media appearances. Billboards are going up. The works.
Some of it will be quite sophisticated. Search ads will be run on Google targeted at people in swing states and districts searching for information on "ACA plans," "Obamacare plans," "health care plans," and the like. This is why Google is so rich. It is possible to use it to microtarget very finely like this. With a TV or newspaper ad, you can't focus specifically on people in certain zip codes looking to buy health insurance.
The Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia are hammering on health care costs. They are blaming the Republicans for the sticker shock. It is an early test of what the blue team will do in 2026. The exit polls will show if health care was a big factor in people's votes. If so, there will be an all-hands-on-deck campaign in 2026 to inform voters that Republicans are causing their health care premiums to soar. This is one of the issues where the public actually trusts the Democrats more than the Republicans and they are going to make the most of it. (V)