by Frank Holmes, reporter
During the most severe inflation of the last 40 years, President Joe Biden decided Americans deserve a huge raise… if they’re on food stamps.
A government watchdog agency said the Biden administration broke the law in order to muscle through the biggest boost in food stamp spending in U.S, history. A constitutional scholar said the act is an “impeachable offense.” But a number of leading Republicans instead voted to force U.S. taxpayers into funding Biden’s welfare raise.
The controversy began last year, when Biden ordered the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to review how much money the federal government gives people who sign up for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). That’s currently the official name for food stamps, which are often put on an EBT card.
How much those benefit cards are worth is determined by the Thrifty Food Plan, which calculates how much it costs for a person to have a healthy but inexpensive diet.
That amount was set in 1975 and its fundamentals have only been adjusted three times in the last 47 years. Those changes have never risen above the level of inflation, as set by law—at least, not until Biden came along.
His administration approved a 21 percent increase to the average food stamp benefit that took place last October 1, a hike that CBS News described as “the largest increase in [SNAP’s] history.”
That’s going to deepen our national debt by $200 billion over the next 10 years, according to an official estimate from the (Democrat-controlled) Congressional Budget Office.
It’s not just that the spending spike ran the budget deeper into red ink than any time before, but Republican critics said the way the Biden-Harris administration forced it through without a vote violated federal law—and a government agency just said they were right.
The Biden administration’s actions violated the law so deeply that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued two full reports about the illegal scandal.
The first issue is that Biden’s food stamp giveaway is so costly that a law called the Congressional Review Act says it has to “be submitted to Congress before it can take effect.” Biden didn’t ask Congress for a vote… not even the current, Democrat-controlled Congress.
The other problem is that Biden and Harris were so hasty to hand out money to food stamp recipients—who are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans—that they broke the laws about how to increase the program’s already bulging costs.
Politicians put extra money on EBT cards during the COVID-19 pandemic, which was set to run out—so the Biden administration sped up the process by 18 months to make sure Democratic voters didn’t face a cut in their welfare benefits.
The Biden administration made at least 11 separate decisions along the line with no documentation, no argument and no peer review.
In fact, the people reviewing the policy were, in a few instances, the same people who wrote the policy, the GAO found.
The Biden administration is working overtime for people who won’t work.
The payoff for food stamp recipients is more than twice the increase for people who already spent their lives working.
The media went wild when Biden announced that Social Security would get an 8.7 percent boost… which only allows senior citizens to keep pace with the record-breaking pace of inflation.
Social Security’s annual cost-of-living adjustment comes to 8.7 percent this year, and not every retiree gets that. The amount depends on the person’s age of retirement.
That comes based on inflation; the food stamp hustle is based on a process that legal scholars say is not just wrong; it’s illegal, unconstitutional, and grounds for Biden to be removed from office.
“Here, Biden’s violating separation of powers again and unilaterally increasing spending on food stamps, another impeachable offense,” wrote Fox News host and constitutional lawyer Mark Levin.
“We are going to need more ‘Food Stamps’ for illegal immigrant aliens, so, of course, Joe Biden breaks our laws to attain his goals. The Biden administration cooked the books to produce a whopping 21% increase in the maximum food stamp benefit,” wrote another Twitter user.
Instead of introducing articles of impeachment over Biden’s lawbreaking welfare spending spree, a significant portion of Republicans in Congress signed off on it. A total of 18 Republican senators voted to pass the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending package, which fully funds Biden’s illegal food stamp expansion, making it “legal.” (It also lets people claim extra EBT funds if they claim some of the money on the card had been “stolen.”)
“From its illegal student bailouts to its complete refusal to enforce our nation’s immigration laws, to this food stamp bonanza, Biden has proven there is no law he won’t break for political gain,” wrote the conservative Washington Examiner.
Why are Republicans going along? Maybe they know the American people will need that increase in food stamps, because they know leading economists predict a coming recession in 2023.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”