WASHINGTON — Two Philadelphia-area Republican congressmen bucked their party Thursday to vote against a 5 percent cut to the food stamp program while other local Republicans, including Lehigh Valley's Rep. Charlie Dent, supported trimming the benefits.
U.S. Reps. Mike Fitzpatrick, 8th District, and Patrick Meehan, 7th District, were among the 15 Republicans who opposed cutting nearly $40 billion over the next decade from the federal food stamp program.
After breaking ranks, Fitzpatrick explained in a statement that most of the food stamp recipients in his Bucks County district are seniors and children, and therefore "the cuts proposed were too deep to earn my vote."
But Fitzpatrick said he supported the part of the bill that would require able-bodied adults between 18 and 50 to be working or in a work-training program to receive the government benefits for longer than three months. That definition would apply to 124,000 Pennsylvanians, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
In addition to Dent, 15th District, area Reps. Lou Barletta, 11th District, and Jim Gerlach, 6th District, voted to cut the program, which costs taxpayers $80 billion annually.
As of 2011, 1.8 million Pennsylvanians received food stamps, a population that has increased by more than half a million since 2008, the year the economy plummeted, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. In 2011, 47,270 people in Lehigh County and 30,276 in Northampton County collected the food assistance.
Republicans cited the increase in food stamp recipients in recent years and allegations of abuses of the benefits as reasons to scale back the program.
"No one in America should go hungry, and everyone who truly needs assistance should have access to it," Barletta said. "However, we should prevent people from defrauding the system, taking benefits and hurting those who actually need them."
The Democratic-controlled Senate has already said the House Republican bill is a nonstarter, and the White House has said it would veto it. No House Democrats, which includes Rep. Matt Cartwright, 17th District, who represents part of Northampton County, and Rep. Allyson Schwartz, 13th District, who is running for governor, voted for the cuts.
Cartwright turned the table on Republicans who had invoked President Bill Clinton's 1996 welfare-to-work reforms during the debate by quoting a GOP hero.
"I agree with former President Reagan, who said, 'As long as there is one person in this country who is hungry, that's one person too many, and something must be done about it'," Cartwright said in a statement after the vote. "As too many children and seniors go to bed hungry each night, my vote today rejecting these shameful cuts was a vote for enacting a bipartisan farm bill that restores essential nutrition initiatives for nearly 50 million Americans."
The food stamp program is typically renewed through a larger farm bill, but the House couldn't pass one this summer. Conservative Republicans in the House helped defeat the farm bill because it included $20 billion in cuts to the food stamp program, which they argued were not deep enough.
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Eugene Tauber contributed to this story.
