If you didn’t know better, you might believe Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) was ushering in a new era of bipartisan compassion with his op-ed this week in the New York Times.
Headlined “No American Should Go to Bed Hungry,” Hawley’s piece struck all the right notes about why the nation must act immediately to preserve SNAP food assistance for 42 million people — now endangered by the government shutdown.
Trouble is, that’s if you didn’t know better.
And the public record knows better.
Less than four months ago, on July 1, Hawley voted to slash SNAP by at least $120 billion over the next decade — the Congressional Budget Office had it at $187 billion. And he can’t even claim party loyalty as a defense: Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Thom Tillis, and Rand Paul all voted no.
But the SNAP cuts were just the appetizer. The “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” —Trump’s sweeping budget package that passed 51-50 with Vice President J.D. Vance breaking the tie — was a banquet of cruelty. Every Democrat voted no. Hawley voted yes.
The bill included:
- More than $1 trillion cut from Medicaid — the largest rollback in U.S. history.
- Work requirements that mostly punish people already working.
- Removal of coverage for lawfully present immigrants.
- Restrictions on provider taxes that help keep rural hospitals alive.
On that last point, Hawley warned colleagues about devastating rural hospitals. He negotiated a $25 billion band-aid spread over five years — then voted to gut the programs anyway. The senator always manages to rationalize his hypocrisy by introducing fig leaf bills he knows are going nowhere.
The bill’s SNAP provisions imposed crushing work requirements and bureaucratic hurdles designed to kick people off the rolls. It penalized states with high “error rates,” meaning Missouri — at 10.2 percent— would lose 25 percent more in funding, despite already struggling to administer the program.
The same bill eliminated Affordable Care Act subsidies for 22 million Americans. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 10 million will lose coverage overall — a devastating blow to working families, low-income seniors and lawfully present immigrants who’ve paid into Medicare for years.
The timeline doesn’t quite line up with Hawley’s soaring rhetoric today.
In May 2025 —just two months before the vote — Hawley wrote another Times op-ed titled “Don’t Cut Medicaid.” In it, he warned that slashing health insurance for working people would be “morally wrong and politically suicidal.”
He even asked: Would Republicans be “a majority party of working people, or a permanent minority speaking only for the C-suite?”
Then in July, he voted for the C-suite.
Now, in October, as his party’s shutdown threatens the food security of 42 million Americans, he’s back with another heartfelt op-ed and a narrow bill to preserve only SNAP. The rest of the government — furloughed workers, shuttered services, disrupted lives — can wait. They’re not in this week’s parable.
You wouldn’t know any of this from today’s Times essay. In it, Hawley casts himself as a cross between FDR and the Apostle Paul.
“Love of neighbor is part of who we are,” he writes. “The Scripture’s injunction to ‘remember the poor’ is a principle Americans have lived by.”
Now, I don’t claim to be a Christian. But from what I understand about the words of Jesus, I’m not aware of any indifference to the poor — or even equivocation — that would inspire slashing SNAP payments or blowing up health-care coverage.
For that matter — and again, I’m no expert — is there language in the New Testament telling us to welcome strangers as long as their immigration papers are in order?
Jesus just fed the hungry and reached out to everyone. There wasn’t any ambiguity involved. And definitely not a residency requirement.
As my readers know, I don’t buy the un-American notion that ours is a Christian nation. It is definitively not — and it belongs to all of us of different faiths, or no faith, as much as it does to Hawley and others who worship as he does.
But even on his best behavior, Hawley today offered Christian benevolence with an asterisk. He warned of “fraud” and “illegal aliens” abusing SNAP, as if that were a national crisis. It’s not. Unauthorized immigrants are mostly ineligible, and fraud rates remain minimal.
But this is more about optics than facts. Hawley portrays the worthy poor as native-born and properly documented — not strangers at the gate.
Hawley does stand out from fellow Republicans who dare not go off script about the poor for fear of crossing Donald Trump and his MAGA minions. The text of his op-ed was just splendid.
But talk is cheap. And it’s heinously cheapened when you just voted against your own piety.
- Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox.
