House Republican Tells Food Stamp Recipients to “Stop Smoking Crack”

GOP Representative Clay Higgins—who, like most congressmen, receives up to $79 per day in meal comps—thinks SNAP recipients should shut up, stop complaining, and stop smoking crack.

“There are 22 million American households receiving SNAP benefits for groceries, at $4200 per year on average. Try to get your head wrapped around how many pantries you can stock with $4200 dollars in properly shopped groceries,” Higgins wrote Thursday on X as thousands of Americans prepare to go without crucial SNAP benefits in the month of November thanks to the government shutdown. “Any American who has been receiving $4200 dollars [sic] per year of free groceries and does NOT have at least 1 month of groceries stocked should never again receive SNAP, because wow, stop smoking crack.”

Higgins sounds like an extremely bitter, hateful, and out of touch piece of shit here, because he is. The average monthly SNAP benefit for households is about $356 per month, or a little more than 80 bucks a week. That is not some lavish gift to splurge, especially if you’re trying to feed multiple mouths in the midst of inflation and trade wars courtesy of President Donald Trump. Grocery prices have only gone up, even after Trump made promise after promise to make just the opposite happen, on the campaign trail. And on top of that, unemployment is going up while hiring slows down.

Trump’s own USDA stated that it costs about $1,000 a month to feed a family of four in this country. That is $250 per week. The average family receiving SNAP benefits is only receiving $80 per week. But here we have Higgins asserting that the people he and the rest of his party are ripping critical aid money from are only using it to buy crack anyway—a racially charged assumption reminiscent of Reagan-era “welfare queen” rhetoric. (And for the record, the majority of SNAP recipients are white.)

While not unsurprising from Higgins, this is still an appalling lack of basic empathy from someone who holds more power than anyone he’s voting to take food from. We can only hope their cruelty comes back to bite them in the midterms.

President Donald Trump’s illegal airstrike campaign targeting Latin American vessels allegedly linked to drug trafficking has led him to a new target: Venezuelan military sites.

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that in weighing whether to expand the president’s military campaign to dry land, the Trump administration had identified the Venezuelan armed forces as a potential target, in what would be considered a major escalation into all-out war.

The Trump administration has alleged that the Latin American country’s cartels are being run by none other than Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has taken a central role in the Trump administration’s campaign to see Maduro out of power, claimed last week that there was “a narco-state in Venezuela run by a cartel,” and compared the government to Al Qaeda.

Last week, Trump stated his intention to expand his lawless strikes to dry land—bragging that Congress wouldn’t stop him. Trump also ordered America’s most advanced aircraft carrier strike group to the Caribbean in a major escalation of military tension between the U.S. and Venezuela.

Since the beginning of September, the U.S. has executed 14 military strikes on vessels and killed 61 people, according to The New York Times. Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs told CNN Thursday that Pentagon officials claimed they “do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes.”

Donald Trump has called for an end to the Senate filibuster, effectively ordering Republicans to not only defy the will of their base but also backtrack on long-standing party policy to end the congressional stalemate.

“It is now time for the Republicans to play their ‘TRUMP CARD,’ and go for what is called the Nuclear Option—Get rid of the Filibuster, and get rid of it, NOW!” Trump wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post Thursday night.

The directive will add monumental pressure on the Senate to find a resolution to the funding blockade, but it’s not clear whether Republicans will bend.

Republican leaders have fought for years to maintain the Senate filibuster, a policy they view as particularly useful as it lends power to the minority party. The upper chamber filibuster requires a bill to gain more than 60 votes in order to advance, an act that rarely happens without bipartisan agreement. Those in favor of the filibuster have argued that the policy encourages compromise. But Republicans have a specific affinity for the unique power as they historically weaponize it to prevent Democrats from enacting sweeping legislative reforms.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune already signaled earlier this month that Republicans would not consider altering the rules to conclude the shutdown, referring to the filibuster as “something that’s been a bulwark against a lot of really bad things happening with the country.”

But with Republicans now controlling every branch of the federal government, Trump expects different results.

“Now WE are in power, and if we did what we should be doing, it would IMMEDIATELY end this ridiculous, Country destroying ‘SHUT DOWN,’” he continued on Truth Social. “If the Republicans are not using the Great Strength and Policies made available to us by ending the Filibuster, the Democrats will exercise their rights, and it will be done in the first day they take office, regardless of whether or not we do it.

“BECAUSE OF THE FACT THAT THE DEMOCRATS HAVE GONE STONE COLD ‘CRAZY,’ THE CHOICE IS CLEAR—INITIATE THE ‘NUCLEAR OPTION,’ GET RID OF THE FILIBUSTER AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump added in a separate post.

The government has been shut down for more than 30 days as of Friday, making it the second-longest federal closure in U.S. history. It’s only bested by a 35-day shutdown between 2018 and 2019 that occurred during Trump’s first term.

Four Republican senators were brave enough to join Democrats in a vote Thursday to end Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs. This was the Senate’s third vote this week to end Trump’s tariffs.

Senator Rand Paul, who served as the Republican sponsor for the resolution alongside Democrat Ron Wyden, and Senators Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski joined the 51–47 vote to end Trump’s tariffs on more than 100 countries.

McConnell said in a statement earlier this week that “tariffs make both building and buying in America more expensive.”

“The economic harms of trade wars are not the exception to history, but the rule. And no cross-eyed reading of Reagan will reveal otherwise,” McConnell added, taking a shot at Trump’s meltdown over a Canadian ad of former President Ronald Reagan speaking negatively about tariffs. “This week, I will vote in favor of resolutions to end emergency tariff authorities.”

The one-page resolution the Senate passed on Thursday ends Trump’s national emergency declaration, which he announced on April 2 to start his global trade war. While this vote sends a message of bipartisan disapproval directly to Trump, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is likely to kill the resolution in the House.

The Trump administration has admitted that they are not trying to identify anyone aboard boats they accuse of sending drugs to the U.S. before bombing the vessels. 

Speaking to CNN Thursday, Democratic Representative Sara Jacobs said she was told in a Pentagon briefing “that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes” and that was part of the reason why the administration has not sought to detain or prosecute the survivors of the strikes, “because they could not satisfy the evidentiary burden.”

As far as the legal justification the White House is using to blow up boats in the waters surrounding Latin America, that information has only been available to select Republicans.

“There’s nothing that we heard in there that changes my assessment that this is completely illegal, that it is unlawful and even if Congress authorized it, it would still be illegal because there are extrajudicial killings where we have no evidence,” Jacobs said, adding that she was told that the only drug targeted in the strikes so far was cocaine, which Pentagon officials called “a facilitating drug of fentanyl.” 

The U.S. has killed at least 61 people in more than a dozen airstrikes on boats in the western hemisphere that it claims are smuggling drugs and are part of “designated terrorist organizations.” The attacks have prompted criticism from countries in the region, including Colombia, Venezuela, and Mexico, and several of the people killed in the strikes have been identified as fishermen.  

Even some Republicans in Congress, such as Representative Mike Turner and Senator Rand Paul, have expressed misgivings about the strikes, with Paul calling them “extrajudicial killings.” Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seem to be planning to go even further, with the president bragging that he wants to begin strikes on land and Hegseth moving 14 percent of the U.S. Navy fleet to the Caribbean Sea. It seems that a war has been declared in all but name.