Vice President JD Vance blasted what he called an apparent overreach by an Obama-appointed judge who ordered the Trump administration on Thursday to make full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments for November, despite a government shutdown caused by Democrats.
Last week, a pair of Obama-appointed U.S. District Court judges—Indira Talwani in Boston and John McConnell in Providence—ruled that SNAP benefits could not be cut off amid the Democrats’ government shutdown. Judge McConnell ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on Friday to resume the handouts either in full or in part “as soon as possible.”
Days later, the Trump administration announced it would comply by exhausting $4.65 billion in contingency funds to make a partial payment covering roughly half of each eligible household’s SNAP benefits for November.
“This Court is not naïve to the administration’s true motivations,” Judge McConnell wrote.
USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, echoing President Donald Trump, emphasized on Monday that the administration does not want vulnerable Americans to suffer. She stated that the USDA is working to “get partial allotments to SNAP households” but warned that “it will take several weeks to execute partial payments.” Rollins added that once “obstructionist Democrats reopen the government, FULL benefits can get to families without delay.”
Democracy Forward, an anti-Trump organization representing the plaintiffs in the case overseen by Judge McConnell, filed an emergency request on Tuesday asking the judge to force the administration to fund SNAP benefits in full.
In their motion, Democracy Forward argued:
“Because it is now clear that due to Defendants’ course of conduct, and by their own admission, undertaking a partial payment plan at this point cannot meet the Court’s directives or adequately remedy the harm Plaintiffs are suffering, the Court should grant Plaintiffs’ motion to enforce and should temporarily enjoin and compel Defendants to release the withheld funding, in its entirety, for November SNAP benefits.”
The USDA has indicated that it will not tap Section 32 funds supplied by tariff revenues to cover SNAP payments. These funds are intended specifically for Child Nutrition Programs, which feed at least 29 million American children and are distinct from SNAP benefits.
In a court filing, the USDA clarified:
“Section 32 Child Nutrition Program funds are not a contingency fund for SNAP. Using billions of dollars from Child Nutrition for SNAP would leave an unprecedented gap in Child Nutrition funding that Congress has never had to fill with annual appropriations, and USDA cannot predict what Congress will do under these circumstances.”
Judge McConnell cited some of President Trump’s recent social media posts, including a Tuesday tweet suggesting that SNAP benefits will only be doled out “when the Radical Left Democrats open up government, which they can easily do, and not before.” McConnell said these posts demonstrate the administration’s “intent to defy” his Friday order and question the sincerity of the USDA’s arguments against using Section 32 funds.
“Far from being concerned with Child Nutrition funding, these statements make clear that the administration is withholding full SNAP benefits for political purposes,” McConnell wrote. “Such ‘unjustifiable partisanship’ has infected the USDA’s decision-making, rendering it arbitrary and capricious.”
The Obama-appointed judge has faced criticism before for what local station WJAR described as his “ties and massive contributions to Democratic politics.”
During a roundtable with Asian leaders at the White House on Thursday, Vice President Vance called the ruling “absurd,” saying, “You have a federal judge effectively telling us what we have to do in the midst of a Democrat government shutdown.”
“What we’d like to do is for the Democrats to open up the government,” Vance continued. “Of course then we can fund SNAP, and we can also do a lot of other good things for the American people. But in the midst of a shutdown, we can’t have a federal court telling the president how he has to triage the situation.”
Vance added, “We’re trying to keep as much going as possible. The president and the entire administration are working on that, but we’re not going to do it under the orders of a federal judge. We’re going to do it according to what we think we have to do to comply with the law, of course, but also to actually make the government work for people in the midst of the Democratic government shutdown.”
The Trump administration has appealed the Obama judge’s ruling to the First Circuit Court of Appeals.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/absurd-jd-vance-blasts-obama-judges-order-to-fully-restore-snap-handouts-amid-democrat-shutdown
