WRITE OF CENTER
On the drive from the hill country up to Fort Worth, you go through many fine west Texas towns. Agricultural communities, the heart of Texas. One of those is Glen Rose. As it turns out, that’s the hometown of Brooke Rollins, who is currently the United States Secretary of Agriculture.
President Trump chose to nominate a strong conservative Republican leader to that job, and she has done Texans proud.
The Agriculture Department administers a program called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. Rollins has uncovered massive fraud and waste in that program; she says SNAP is “so bloated, broken, dysfunctional and corrupt that it is astonishing.”
Her department has found 186,000 dead individuals who are still receiving SNAP benefits! They found instances of individuals receiving benefits in multiple states simultaneously, including one person who was receiving benefits in six different states.
She noted that 700,000 people have been removed from the program rolls this year so far, and 118 people have been arrested in connection with fraud investigations. We the people applaud this work, reducing the waste of our tax dollars. And of course, we can hear the hue and cry from liberal leftists, with their hysterics and drama about welfare cuts. To be sure, and clear, those programs must be there for Americans in need. So, let’s root out the waste and fraud so that needy people can be helped.
Then there is the fraud uncovered in Minnesota recently. Wow. The House Oversight Committee’s investigation uncovered more than $1 Billion of taxpayer money scammed through social services companies. And it is not finished; there is more to come. So far, 60 defendants have been convicted, and federal prosecutors just charged 78 people in Minnesota cases which they called “ the largest Covid- 19 fraud scheme in the country.”
It all started in 2022, under the Biden administration, with the current Democrat governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz. Fraudsters claimed to open feeding sites across the state that served thousands of needy children and submitted bogus rosters of kids to receive taxpayer funds. In fact, no meals were served at many sites, which in some cases were parking lots or vacant commercial spaces. One defendant was sentenced last month to 10 years in prison, after he took in more than $900,000 in fraud proceeds and spent some of it on a honeymoon in the Maldives, $30,000 on jewelry in Dubai, and $64,000 for a new Dodge Ram pickup. All with our tax dollars.
Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, a Republican, said, “This is probably the tip of the iceberg.” And these fraud cases took on a whole new dimension when the Manhattan Institute alleged that millions of dollars in stolen taxpayer funds from Minnesota were allegedly sent to Somalia and ended up with al-Shabaab, the Somali branch of al Qaeda.
Their investigation blamed Minnesota’s “bleeding heart bureaucracy” and “cynically deployed” accusations of racism against people who raised concerns about problems in the nutrition program. In other words, fraudsters were using “minority-owned” status to cash in and then crying “racism” to avoid scrutiny.
Minnesota’s governor said “Minnesota is a generous state. It is a prosperous state, a wellrun state, we are AAA bond- rated, but that attracts criminals.” Actually, it doesn’t. What attracts criminals is the good chance they will get away with the crime.
The root of this poisonous tree grew from a seed planted during the Biden administration. They gave Medicaid waivers that let states use federal tax dollars to pay for housing, food, transportation, sports fees, and even Indian herbal remedies and exorcisms. Minnesota took that encouragement and ran with it. Thankfully, Trump won the election last year, and a new administration has taken over Washington.
What can we do about it, here in Kendall County? We can elect strong, principled, conservative Republican leaders to every office between Boerne and Washington. It’s easy to see which candidates are the Republicans on our local ballots.
In November next year, our conservative Republican candidates will have an “R” by their name. More than half of our Kendall County voters cast their ballot exclusively for Republican candidates. It reflects our traditions and values here in the hill country.
Let’s vote every election and keep it that way.
Scott S. Kramer is former Chairman of the Kendall County Republican Party.
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