Political Quotes

“Sure. I chair the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, and we are in charge of funding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the SNAP program. If you were paying attention about an hour ago, an hour and a half ago, to the folks from the other side of the aisle, all they wanted to do was push more money into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The second word there, by the way, is ``nutrition.'' If you go back to the original founding, the program was founded to provide nutrition. In the early days of the program, there was a significant number of people in the country who actually did not receive enough calories. Literally, they didn't receive enough calories. At that time, the emphasis was to get food of all kinds to these folks so that they are not calorie starved. Again, I talked about the trend in obesity, and what we see is that something is happening. We have programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program where the last time they looked at it was in 2016--it might have been earlier than that--where 10 percent of the funds went to sugary soda. Remember, this is a $122 billion a year program of taxpayer dollars. We ask taxpayers to pony up or to borrow $122 billion to put into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.…”