Rabbinic reflections on "Loyalty"

Our rabbi, Adam Zeff, always goes high when they go low.  Below is his response to the ravings of an evil lunatic about Jewish Americans' "disloyalty".  

Rabbi Zeff looks through the prism of historical precedent at this repetition of the anti-Semitic attack cycle that has come around so many times when autocrats have felt threatened and instinctively find Jews a convenient target toward which to displace public disapproval.  

Last fall we visited the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.  The exhibits meticulously and vividly tell the story of this cycle over the centuries as various political structures and regimes came and went.  Each time there was disequilibrium, the status and rights of Jews were among the first parts of society to be in flux.  They contracted and expanded depending on the perceived value of deflecting toward the Other versus the value of empowering Jewish talent to contribute to economic and social development.  

Polish history in that sense paralleled the historical cycles of most European countries.  Jews' inclusion was always tentative and subject to revocation. 

America is now being tested to see if it really is exceptional in that most essential way -- the way that its philosophical foundations projected it to be, wherein all comers would become Americans, and where there would be no outsiders. 

Loyalty

As part of the long history of the Jewish people, we are accustomed to having our loyalty questioned, from Babylon to Rome to medieval Europe to contemporary America.  We remember how kings and leaders and governments have used the accusation of disloyalty to separate Jews from others, to impose disabilities on us, to oppress us, and to kill us.  We know how dangerous these accusations are, both to Jews and to other minorities--people of color, Muslims, immigrants, LGBTQ people--who have also too often been identified as outsiders and denied the same consideration and rights as their fellow citizens.  So we know that no matter where and when and from whose mouth our loyalty is attacked, we must stand up and oppose the false dichotomy between being Jewish and being a loyal citizen of the U.S. or whatever state we find ourselves in.

At the same time, we must realize that there is a consistent reason that Jews throughout history have been accused of disloyalty to human leaders and human governments.  As we will declare together on the High Holidays in just a few weeks, although we acknowledge the importance of human leadership structures, our ultimate loyalty is not to a human being or a human state.  We praise God as "the Ruler of the Rulers of Rulers" to emphasize that we do not bow down to humans, who are ultimately fallible, but only to God, who represents the divine values of justice, equality, peace, and love to which we commit ourselves.  Because we insist on being loyal to the values of Torah above any human being, we have been a constant thorn in the side of those human leaders who demand complete loyalty to themselves above all.  We have been blessed throughout our history to see those leaders fail and to see our faith in Torah rewarded.  In our effort to defend ourselves from charges of disloyalty in the human realm, may we never forget the divine values to which we must always remain loyal, no matter what any leader says.  And may our faith in the ultimate triumph of those values be rewarded.

T. Friedman: If You Think Trump Is Helping Israel, You’re a Fool

After Friday night's Real Time show on HBO, Rep. RashidaTlaib called for a boycott of Bill Maher to punish him for calling the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement a "bullsh*t purity test" and daring to point out that BDS's origin and purpose is the goal of dissolving Israel into a single Palestinian state. 

In an email post to friends about Tlaib and her fellow BDS advocate Ilhan Omar, I speculated about Tlaib and Omar's district constituents' satisfaction with the way their House reps are spending their political capital.  I thought BDS might not be at the top of their priority list for their House members, but I acknowledged that I was only speculating.  

So, it turns out that Tom Friedman had already written an op-ed column asking the same question regarding Omar's district, except that he is not just speculating.  Coincidentally, Friedman grew up in Omar's district. He is in touch with what's happening there, what people in the district perceive their most urgent problems to be and what their hopes had been for Omar to serve as a unifier of the diverse elements in the community rather than a divider.  

It's rare that I ever read a Friedman column wherein I find myself in greater harmony with his thinking with each successive paragraph.  In this one I think he's writing more from the heart than from the head. Nowhere is that more evident than in this penultimate line of the column, which resonates so profoundly with my own feelings and apprehensions:

I love Israelis, Palestinians and Arabs — but God save me from some of their American friends. So many of them just want to exploit this problem to advance themselves politically, get attention, raise money or delegitimize their opponents.

Finally, segueing from that very important observation, I conclude with the e-letter I just sent to Democracy for America in response to DFA's appeal for a donation so that the organization could continue its campaign of support for Reps. Omar and Tlaib.  The DFA alignment with Omar and Tlaib is a stark and timely example of Friedman's observation above, and it validates concerns of Democrats concerned about 2020 unification and advocates of a strong U.S.-Israel alliance that this past week's events are damaging to both.

Dear DFA:

As a supporter of Israel who is as disgusted by and opposed to the policies of Netanyahu as I am to the policies of Trump, I condemned Israel's refusing entry to Omar and Tlaib at the behest of Trump.  My condemnation was not in the slightest informed by support for the positions of the Congresswomen, it was a reaction to a very high-profile series of actions that damage the U.S.-Israel alliance.

DFA's support for Omar and Tlaib, absent a disclaimer that your support does not encompass their support for BDS, suggests to me that DFA supports BDS.  I'm all for their freedom to express their views, including Tlaib's view that Israel ought not to exist as an independent nation that serves as the lone refuge in the world for Jews after two thousand years of persecution and disenfranchisement.  

However, my opposition to censoring or banning people for disagreeable political activism does NOT translate into material support for that activism.  BDS is founded on the ultimate goal of eliminating the state of Israel along with stated goal of ending the Israeli military presence in the PA territory, so people who support BDS are either ignorant of that or in agreement with that ultimate goal. Based on their statements, I believe Omar and Tlaib are in agreement with the goal of a one-state Palestine that entails the end of Israel.  

One last thought for you: should we promote a world-wide boycott of the United States until the inhumane Trump treatment of Central American refugees and the rejection of the climate accords and the Iran deal all end?  Those policies are putting all of humanity at significantly greater risk, exponentially more so than any of Israel's policies.    

All best, HD

No, Marc Thiessen, the right is not a refuge from anti-Semitism

On August 12, NYT columnist and Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote about billionaire Stephen Ross’s Hamptons fund-raiser for the “president” in a piece titled “Useful Idiots and Trumpist Billionaires”.  Krugman took Ross, a fellow member of the Jewish faith, to task for supporting a demagogue who encourages anti-Semitic groups and conspiracy theories and is making his best effort to leave Ross’s grandchildren an overheated and politically destabilized world. Krugman write that financially powerful Trumpists are ego-driven, placing the enhancement of their own perceived status above their own long-term welfare and above prospects for humanity’s progress toward a peaceful, thriving co-existence.


Right away, there were many loud reactions from the right taking great umbrage at Krugman’s argument that Jewish billionaires who support Trump are self-defeating dupes, seduced by appeals to the lower angels of their nature.  One of those reactors has access to column space in the Washington Post. Marc Thiessen is a Trumpist through-and-through, essentially having filled the space in the commentary sphere for Trump that Charles Krauthammer once filled for GW Bush.  He doesn’t promulgate lies the way they do on Fox News, he spins, exaggerating and minimizing facts so as to build arguments that seem evidence-based but topple right over when the shrinking and stretching of reality are called out.


So on August 13^th, Thiessen’s column, “The rise of anti-Semitism on the left”, appeared in the WashPost.  It was re-printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday the 16^th, at which time I came across it.  Thiessen makes no mention at all of Krugman’s column, but it’s too much of a coincidence to believe that it’s anything but a message to Jews intended as a counterweight to the Krugman column of the previous day.  


As is his wont, Thiessen spun reality out of all recognition in defense of the GOP/Trump/right-wing. It is always a frustrated project of the political right wing to eat into the 70-75% Democratic majority of Jewish voters.  The Thiessen column was a piece of reality-stretching propaganda in service of that project. I took it on myself to write a letter to the Inquirer editor to topple his bizarro reality.  As of this writing, I don't know if it will be published in the paper, but if it is I will update accordingly here.

My letter went kinda like this:   


To the editor:        

Marc Thiessen would have Jews believe that anti-Semitism on "the left" is comparable to or greater than anti-Semitism acted out by people associated with the white-supremacist far-right.  Thiessen cites as evidence of the left's threat to Jews a disturbing comment by a Democratic Congresswoman in which she analogized a boycott of Israel with the boycott of Nazi Germany 85 years ago.  He adds to that some survey about Europeans' perceptions of sources of anti-Semitism across the European political spectrum.

So presumably Jews should wake up, sense the danger posed by Democrats and seek refuge on the right with the Republicans.  So up against a disturbing comment and the opinions of Europeans on a survey, I am comparing the welcoming embrace of the right.  Let's see, mass synagogue shootings in Pittsburgh and Poway, and marchers in Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us".  Thiessen leaves out the fact that the El Paso mass murderer's manifesto explained his action as a reaction to "The Great Replacement", a right-wing conspiracy theory wherein central American asylum seekers are actually being herded northward by wealthy powerful Jews.  

These blatant, murderous acts of hatred are fueled by the right.  Thiessen has the gall to minimize "the rise of far-right populism" as a factor -- they "account for only a fraction of these anti-Semitic incidents". Regarding American incidents, that is a reprehensibly dishonest characterization.  It's not "populism", it's the most despicable form of racism, an evil sickness, one which the president, for whom Thiessen is ever an apologist, has been very reluctant to condemn or to dissociate himself from.    

"President" inspires violence in minds ready to act out hate

In the course of a normal day people have thoughts and impulses that would certainly violate our standards of right and wrong were we to act them out.  The vast majority of adults can and do let them pass without inner struggle and without verbally or physically expressing them.  For a personal example, in the course of an MSNBC weeknight it's not unusual for me to flash on a fantasy involving the meeting of a pointy object and the temporal lobe of, say, an AG with the voice of a hedgehog declaring "No collusion, no obstruction". But in the reality sphere I haven't actually done bodily harm to anyone since my brother and I stopped having "playful" wrestling matches that ended with butt-size depressions in the sheetrock walls. 

But then there are these small but growing cyber-communities of people whose days and minds are not normal, wherein they cultivate among themselves ethnic and racial hatred, they group-validate these evil impulses, and they egg each other on toward violent acting out. "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed", wrote Yeats in The Second Coming.  Now there is the upwelling of dark psychic forces, and there is a man with the greatest access to media in the history of the world, and he's giving sanction to hate, and far worse, to expressing hate verbally and physically. The white-nationalist cyber-communities of anti-immigrant racist grievance not only are heartened by rump's naked, uncoded encouragement, they have been materially abetted by rump administration policies that have gutted monitoring, investigation and intervention resources for heading these mass murdering terrorists off at the pass the way law enforcement and intelligence agents have done in cases of internationally inspired terrorism.

The dark thing is possessing human bodies, these lost souls are trading in their very lives for the chance to kill strangers, and until now the only measures taken by the federal government have only served to take obstacles out of the path of those with the intention to commit acts of terroristic murder.

This morning the hater-in-chief read a teleprompter speech in that droning monotone that signals about 100% of the time that two days later he will scoff at everything his presidential shell was forced to say in the canned message. He did mention "white supremacy" and "domestic terrorism" in the speech as a sop to the mass of critics of his racist rants, but other than that brief mention, his solutions were all in line with the GOP/NRA propaganda that video games and mental illness are the problem. Ergo, the speech waved at the idea of flagging people whose psychiatric problems contraindicate gun ownership, but he slid by the majority-supported implementation of universal background checks, and he shied away from applying the same laws and strategies to combat and prevent domestic terrorism as are used to fight international terrorism. Right now there is no mystery about where online this incitement is taking place, but reportedly there is no enabling legislation and regulations to take measures to intervene in that community of hate and identify/neutralize threats to American citizens. This is a war of minds and souls. A resident Inquirer columnist wrote this morning that it was partisan propaganda to assert that rump's attacks on Cummings and Baltimore were in any way racist. Mick Mulvaney dismissed any connection between rump's attacks on Mexicans, asylum-seekers and Congresswomen and the motivating factors driving Patrick Crusius to El Paso. Americans are either going to trust their own eyes and brains to see the evidence and lay the blame, or they aren't.

After El Paso, We Can No Longer Ignore Trump's Role in Inspiring Mass Shootings

By Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept

04 August 19  

n Saturday morning, a gunman at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, shot and killed at least 20 people before surrendering to the police. By all accounts, Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old alleged shooter, is a fan of President Donald Trump and his policies. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “a Twitter account bearing the suspect’s name contains liked tweets that include a ‘BuildTheWall’ hashtag” and “a photo using guns to spell out ‘Trump.’”

Incredibly, the nation woke up to more grim news on Sunday, with reports that a man suited up in body armor and bearing a rifle with high-capacity magazines had carried out a rampage in Dayton, Ohio, killing at least nine people and injuring 26.

Little is known yet about the Dayton shooter, but a four-page manifesto authorities believe was written by Crusius and posted shortly before the El Paso attack is full of the kind of hateful rhetoric and ideas that have flourished under Trump.

The manifesto declares the imminent attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion,” accuses Democrats of “pandering to the Hispanic voting bloc,” rails against “traitors,” and condemns “race mixing” and “interracial unions.” “Yet another reason to send them back,” it says.

Sound familiar? The president of the United States — who condemned the El Paso attack on Twitter — has repeatedly referred to an “invasion” at the southern border; condemned Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and Syrian refugees as “snakes;” accused his critics of treason on at least two dozen occasions; and told four elected women of color to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.” (It is worth noting that Crusius, in his alleged manifesto, claims his views “predate” and are unrelated to Trump, but then goes on to attack “fake news.”)

That there could be a link between the attacker and the president should come as no surprise. But it might. Over the past four years, both mainstream media organizations and leading Democrats have failed to draw a clear line between Trump’s racist rhetoric and the steadily multiplying acts of domestic terror across the United States. Some of us tried to sound the alarm — but to no avail.

“Cesar Sayoc was not the first Trump supporter who allegedly tried to kill and maim those on the receiving end of Trump’s demonizing rhetoric,” I wrote last October, in the concluding lines of my column on the arrest of the so-called #MAGAbomber. “And, sadly, he won’t be the last.”

***

How I wish I could have been proven wrong. Yet since the publication of that piece almost a year ago, which listed the names of more than a dozen Trump supporters accused of horrific violence, from the neo-Nazi murderer of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville to the Quebec City mosque shooter, there have been more and more MAGA-inspired attacks. In January, four men were arrested for a plot to attack a small Muslim community in upstate New York — one of them, according to the Daily Beast, “was an avid Trump supporter online, frequently calling for ‘Crooked Hillary’ Clinton to be arrested and urging his followers to watch out for Democratic voter fraud schemes when they cast their ballots for Trump in 2016.”

In March, a far right gunman murdered 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand — and left behind a document describing Muslim immigrants as “invaders” and Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”

And now, this latest massacre in El Paso. Let’s be clear: in an age of rising domestic terrorism cases — the majority of which are motivated by “white supremacist violence,” according to FBI Director Christopher Wray — Trump is nothing less than a threat to our collective security. More and more commentators now refer, for example, to the phenomenon of “stochastic terrorism” — originally defined by an anonymous blogger back in 2011 as “the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”

Sounds pretty Trumpian, right? As I wrote in October: “The president may not be pulling the trigger or planting the bomb, but he is enabling much of the hatred behind those acts. He is giving aid and comfort to angry white men by offering them clear targets — and then failing to fully denounce their violence.”

And as I pointed out on CNN earlier this year, there is a simple way for Trump to distance himself from all this. Give a speech denouncing white nationalism and the violence it has produced. Declare it a threat to national security. Loudly disown those who act in his name. Tone down the incendiary rhetoric on race, immigration, and Islam.

Trump, however, has done the exact opposite. In March, in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, the president said he did not consider white nationalism to be a rising threat, dismissing it as a “small group of people.” A month earlier, in February, Trump was asked whether he would moderate his language after a white nationalist Coast Guard officer was arrested over a plot to assassinate leading journalists and Democrats. “I think my language is very nice,” he replied.

In recent weeks, the president has again launched nakedly racist and demagogic attacks on a number of black and brown members of Congress, not to mention the black-majority city of Baltimore. When his cultish supporters responded to his attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., with chants of “send her back,” Trump stood and watched and later referred to them as “patriots.”

So we’re supposed to be surprised or shocked that white nationalist violence is rising on his watch? That hate crimes against almost every minority group have increased since his election to the White House in 2016?

On Tuesday, just days before this latest act of terror in El Paso, the leaders of the Washington National Cathedral issued a scathing, and startlingly prescient, rebuke of Trump:

Make no mistake about it, words matter. And, Mr. Trump’s words are dangerous.

These words are more than a “dog-whistle.” When such violent dehumanizing words come from the President of the United States, they are a clarion call, and give cover, to white supremacists who consider people of color a sub-human “infestation” in America. They serve as a call to action from those people to keep America great by ridding it of such infestation. Violent words lead to violent actions.

Thanks to his hate-filled rhetoric, his relentless incitement of violence, and his refusal to acknowledge the surge in white nationalist terrorism, the president poses a clear and present danger to the people, and especially the minorities, of the United States.

Dems had better come out unified for our Showdown with Evil

On Thursday night Lawrence O'Donnell exposed Chris Matthews for playing goofball, not hardball, along with all the other "pundits" across TV newsland who talk about debate winners and losers, zingers and breakout moments and all the other bullshit that passes for commentary that ought to be about the supposed opportunity to gain insight into candidates' relative presidential potential.

In his segment called "presidents don't debate" Lawrence referenced his own experience as a chief of staff for a high-ranking senator to distinguish what goes on in TV debates from what would go on if they were designed to put candidates to a valid test of skills a president needs.  

The superficiality of scoring a debate like a boxing match goes along with the exploitative, unprincipled grasping for ratings that drove news media's 2016 obsessive airing of rump's rallies like flies driven by mindless DNA to light on road kill and shit.  

The main productive outcome of these debates is to expose the candidates' views to the voters and to winnow the field to the handful of candidates viable enough to warrant a presence in the caucuses and primaries next year.  They may also serve candidates themselves in using the feedback they get to "refine" their positions -- e.g., if I were able to get a half hour with Elizabeth Warren I would spend the whole time hammering at her to refine her advocacy of eliminating private health insurance, maybe recasting it as having been a negotiating position in which private insurance would give up its opposition to a public option in exchange for surrender on banning them.    

A major risk is that these debates produce rich sources of oppo attacks using debate sound bites against the nominee -- and against the last Democratic president for that matter.  An even major-er risk is that supporters of some current candidates become hardened against the eventual nominee and/or that some on-and-off voters will switch off and not show up in 2020.  

We can't afford not to have the most massive possible tsunami of Democratic voters registered and active in 2020.  We have to overwhelm them in national, state and local races to redirect the country toward restoration of respect for democracy, the rule of law and the project of perfecting our achievement of foundational American values and principles of enfranchisement, equality and justice for all.

That's the bright light at the end of the pitch-dark tunnel.  The alternative is an unrecognizably disfigured pit of evil sucking us down to spiritual and material destruction like industrial-waste quicksand.  

This week's front in the war against Evil incarnate: The article below reports on the BPOE administration's plan to change eligibility rules from the legally defined income ceilings to a lower level that would yank food support from 3.1 million low-income Americans.  As the article notes, families losing food-stamp eligibility also means their kids losing free lunch at school.   

Now in our lives we've often seen Repubicans trying to screw poor people out of survival-enabling benefits in the pretextual name of fiscal prudence.  They are willing to make children hungry, to undermine their mental and physical fitness to learn and develop, in order to feed white grievance over economic displacement and, as the article says, to plug a piece of the deficit hole created by their tax cuts that went to the rich and thus put a fig leaf over evidence of the administration's indifference to the conned blue-collared MAGAs' lives and fortunes.  

So looking within the strict margins of this SNAP-cut move, you could chalk this week's chapter in the annals of Evil to traditionally run-of-the-mill-cruel-and-inhumane GOP racist pandering and political posturing.  

But looking at it in the broader context of all the shameless lies, deceptions, cruelties and inhumanities in every single sphere of executive action since January 20, 2017, it's not as innocent as mere old-timey GOP strategy of scapegoating and slashing aid to minorities and the poor to con votes from uneducated working-class whites in order to enrich the rich.  Looking at concentration camps for utterly vulnerable children kidnapped from their parents, looking at rescinding environmental protections so that many people will suffer and die from air, ground and water pollutants, and looking at embracing literally murderous totalitarian rulers and voicing envy for their "control of their people", I see the actions of a dark psychic force uprisen from the gutters à la Ghostbusters.  

This regime seems to be fueled by the loosing of hate-infused sadism as an end in itself.  It's no longer just a political strategy for a minority party desperate to mortgage its soul for power, it's something closer to a collective possession. (While I will be happy to see Marianne Williamson gone from the scene for the great preponderance of dangerous stupidity in her present and past statements, her warning about "dark psychic forces" does sync with my long-standing take on our present challenge.)  

Last year I wrote about a powerful documentary about the Warsaw Ghetto called Who will Write Our History?  The film visually and narratively documents how the initial indignities and constraints on the movement and rights of Polish Jews incrementally were deepened and tightened until the Nazis turned the Ghetto into a literal death camp where the ultimate choice was starvation or suicide by violent uprising.  

All remnants of that sector of Warsaw have been razed and rebuilt, but in the very center of the former Warsaw Ghetto is the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews.  I've been there, and it's as worthy as a monument of enlightenment and admonition can be to the suffering inflicted on innocent human beings by sheer inhumanity run amok, carried out by complicit moral automatons under orders from above.  

I'm not meaning to suggest this current crisis is particularly about threats to Jews, I'm applying the lenses I've assimilated from these experiences to look at the threats to all of us right now.  It's a showdown with evil, and we damn well can't have effing Jill Stein, Gary Johnson, Bernie bros, or unmotivated voters this time around.  Given the tentacles of Russian cyber-criminals into our social media, our Repubican Party and our election systems, I don't know how corrupted this election will be before, during and after Election Day, but the best we can do is the best we can do. 

Renewed effort to cut food-stamp eligibility

Nearly 500,000 recipients in Pa., N.J. could lose aid.

By Alfred Lubrano STAFF WRITER

The Trump administration is proposing changes to the foodstamp program that could result in 3.1 million Americans losing their benefits — including 200,000 Pennsylvanians and 250,000 New Jerseyans.

In addition, the plan could deprive some low-income children of access to free school lunches.

The proposal is the latest of several put forward by the president to cut food stamps.

The newest changes were considered by Congress last December and rejected. But the Trump administration is advancing them anyway as part of a suggested revision to rules in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The proposal would end the practice of allowing low-income working people whose gross incomes are somewhat higher than the poverty level to receive SNAP benefits.

The administration said it is looking to save nearly $2 billion a year through the cuts, according to USDA statistics. Around 38 million Americans receive SNAP benefits, nearly 500,000 in Philadelphia, federal and state figures show.

At the same time that the USDA mentioned cost savings, the department recognized that removing people from the SNAP rolls “may also negatively impact food security.”

That statement has angered antihunger advocates.

“Wow, they don’t even care that they’ll be increasing hunger,” said Ellen Vollinger, legal director of the Food Research and Action Center in Washington, the nation’s leading antihunger lobby.

Closer to home, Gov. Tom Wolf called the Trump administration plan “ludicrous,” saying it would disproportionately affect working families, the elderly, and the disabled. He added that “depriving people of the means for adequate sustenance and a healthier life is cruel and inhumane.”

While state officials estimate that the Trump administration plan would jeopardize the SNAP benefits of about 200,000 Pennsylvanians, local advocates have not determined how many Philadelphians would be affected.

Cutting SNAP benefits could affect lunch for low-income school children because a family’s SNAP status is part of what officials use to determine student eligibility, advocates say.

‘Fair and efficient’

USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue said the cuts would be necessary to maintain sound fiscal policy. He said a “loophole” in federal law allowed states to expand SNAP help “to people who don’t need it.” He added that the loophole “has been used to effectively bypass important eligibility guidelines.”

Purdue went on to say, “The American people expect their government to be fair, efficient, and to have integrity — just as they do in their own homes, businesses, and communities. That is why we are changing the rules preventing abuse of a critical safety net system.”

Vollinger said it’s misleading to call the existing provision that guides SNAP eligibility a “loophole.” “It sounds like something that snuck through,” she said. “But it’s a law that was fully vetted through the [George W.] Bush administration. And Congress supported it.”

Currently, people throughout America are eligible for SNAP benefits if their gross income is at or below 130% of the federal poverty line of around $25,000 for a family of four. This works out to a little more than $33,000 for such a family.

But a federal policy known as “broad-based categorical eligibility” allows states to raise the gross income eligibility level to as much as 200% of poverty in some cases. In Pennsylvania, the allowable gross income level for benefits is 160% of the federal poverty, or about $41,000 for a family of four. Along with Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and 38 other states use categorical eligibility.

“The administration would force Pennsylvania to go down to 130% of poverty,” said Kathy Fisher, policy director of the Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger. ‘We already know from studies that just 130% of poverty isn’t a high enough limit for people to feed their families.”

Fisher added that the administration plan would also add an asset test, meaning that people’s bank accounts, car ownership, and other holdings would be considered as their SNAP levels were determined. Pennsylvania did away with its asset test in 2015.

Traditionally, many Republicans have argued against asset tests, saying they penalize low-income people for accumulating savings to help pull themselves out of poverty.

Also, it takes extra time and effort to determine a SNAP recipient’s assets, which “clogs up county assistance offices,” Fisher said, and actually costs states more money.

The Trump administration “wants to take away long-standing law to cut SNAP benefits,” said Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the nonprofit Coalition on Human Needs in Washington. “People would be facing a precipitous cutoff.”

Paying for tax cuts?

Vollinger said she believes the administration is eliminating many SNAP benefits because it has to pay for the large tax cuts it gave well-off Americans.

It’s not the first time the Trump administration has gone after food stamps.

In March, it looked to increase work requirements for SNAP recipients. In May, it proposed a new way to calculate poverty to keep many Americans from receiving aid. Last year, Trump recommended sending boxes of food instead of SNAP benefits to people, an idea decried as impractical and likely more expensive than the SNAP program itself.

The Trump administration proposal is scheduled to be debated during a two-month comment period.

Ultimately, the plan will cause too many problems, according to Kate Scully, director of government affairs for Philabundance, the region’s largest hunger-relief agency.

“We are so concerned,” Scully said. “If the rules change, the administration will increase hunger [and] hurt the community and the country.”