Rep. Dennis Rehberg (R-MT), who’s expected to face Sen. John Tester (D) in the Montana Senate race next year, is worried that some families who receive federally-subsidized lunches may be gaming the system and therefore bilking you out of your hard-earned taxpayer dollars. It’s about waste, fraud and abuse, he suggests. But Democrats say it’s about something else: A Republican looking to scrimp on a program that benefits the least fortunate of all Americans, poor children, while he fights to protect subsidies for multi-billion dollar oil companies.
I suppose this might make sense in an exceedingly odd sort of way. After all, Ronald Reagan had his “welfare queens”, and other Conservatives have managed to find bogeymen among the poor and downtrodden that they could, without a hint of irony, blame for all of America’s ills. Now come Dennis Rehberg, a nonentity in Congress who, rather than work toward solving the problems that we actually do face (that would risk handing President Obama a victory), is looking for bogeymen and evildoers among…wait for it…those whose children receive subsidized school lunches. After all, if people are scamming free or discounted lunches when they don’t deserve it, the terrorists will win. And how are we going to be able to afford to continue subsidizing oil companies or tax breaks for the wealthy?
Rehberg may be the 23rd-wealthiest member of Congress, but it appears the poor guy is struggling just like everyone else…and so he’s looking for waste and fraud wherever he think they might exist.
Of course, no reasonable person would believe that fraud of any sort is a good thing. Given that the total cost of school lunch subsidies runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $1 billion, any saving realized by cracking down on (real or imagined) fraud will do little to dent the federal deficit. Then again, it is easier to pick on those who can’t fight back than it is to roll back the Bush tax cuts or stop subsidizing protable oil companies who clearly no longer need a handout.
No one will ever accuse Dennis Rehberg of being an enlightened or gifted politician. What he does have is a gift for running in place and making it look as if he’s actually accomplishing something positive. Then again, if you consider what he’s done for oil companies and the super-rich, the one thing he’s really good at is understanding who’s buttering his bread…and it certainly isn’t the poor and disadvantaged.
