Saturday is November 1—the day open enrollment begins on the Obamacare exchanges, and thus the day that those 20 million people will start learning in specific terms how much their health care premiums are going to increase. It is also the day that the Trump administration will stop paying SNAP benefits, the nutritional assistance program that helps 42 million Americans buy food for themselves and their families, at an average of around $175 a month. It will do this despite the presence of a $6 billion reserve fund to cover food stamp emergencies, which the administration argued in court Thursday it couldn’t or wouldn’t spend because this is not an emergency. Or the right kind of emergency. Or something.

In addition, it will be the thirty-second day of the current government shutdown (the longest was 35 days, during Donald Trump’s first term). It will also mark 51 days since the House of Representatives, under Speaker Mike Johnson, has cast a vote. And it will be 38 days since the election of Democrat Adelita Grijalva to the Arizona House seat held by her father without her yet being sworn in, a situation about which Johnson, who by law must perform the ceremony, has told lie after pathetic lie. He has kept the House out of session and delayed her swearing in for one reason alone, which everyone knows: She’ll be the 218th vote to release the files relating to Jeffrey Epstein.

So these are Mike Johnson’s Christian values, as Paul Krugman put it on his Substack Tuesday: "It sounds crazy to say that Republicans are making children go hungry to protect pedophiles, but it’s actually a reasonable interpretation of the situation."

Following up on TNR’s last conversation around our September issue, join The New Republic and David Blight, Yale University’s Sterling Professor of History, as he asks fellow academics: How must we fight to preserve our history and democracy?

It’s a 100 percent reasonable interpretation. If Johnson weren’t paralyzed by the looming Epstein vote, which he wouldn’t have the power to block from coming to the floor, the House could be in session, voting, and it could have done something about getting those SNAP benefits to people. In fact, the only factor that makes Krugman’s interpretation an other-than-reasonable one is that Republicans, given their long-standing and ferocious hostility to food stamps and every program that makes poor people’s burden a bit lighter, might not agree to vote for emergency spending. They’ve been trying and sometimes succeeding at making deep cuts to this program for nearly 15 years.

Many people have pointed out that Republicans are harming their own constituents, since many SNAP recipients are rural and white. People point this out as if the Republicans don’t know this, and telling them would make them go, "Oh, heck, we forgot, thank you, we better go change our ways. Praise Jesus." News flash: They know. They just don’t care.

And their president certainly doesn’t care. Initially, the Department of Agriculture had said that the emergency fund would be tapped in case November 1 came and went without the government reopening. But then the department reversed course. And so the Trump administration was in court Thursday arguing that the reserve fund was there for natural disasters only.

Funny thing—Trump has moved around hundreds of millions of dollars to pay the troops, which is fine, and to pay the masked and unbadged men rounding up many innocent people for deportation, which is very much not fine. He also sent $20 billion to his neofascist pal in Argentina to help him win an election and prop up his regime—a bailout, The New York Times reported, that will benefit at least two personal friends of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But it won’t use money to feed poor people that is just sitting there for that very purpose.

As for the premiums under Obamacare, we’ve seen a few early numbers. November 1 brings a double whammy: the normal yearly increases as the reenrollment period begins, and the end of extra subsidies passed during the pandemic if Congress doesn’t renew them. The New York Times found a woman in Oregon who has been paying $459 a month and who next year will have to start paying $1,059 a month, with a pulverizing deductible of $7,100. Another woman from California was set to see her costs rise from $865 a month to $1,965.

Not that the Republicans care about this in practice either. But in theory, at least, Mike Johnson could hold votes on this matter too. But that would involve calling the House back into session, which would mean—according to his own worthless promises—that he’d have to seat Grijalva, and that’s a nonstarter. He has to protect those people whose names appear in those files—or at least one person’s. After all, who can forget the imperishable New Testament chapter wherein Jesus said to let the poor children go hungry and the undeserving poor take ill and die for the sake of protecting sexual predators?

These people are beyond immoral.

Inevitably in these situations, there’s a lot of talk about which party is "winning" the shutdown. So fine, let’s play that dull game for a bit. I’ll make two points.

First: I do not understand why the Democrats haven’t been shouting about Grijalva nonstop, making sure America knows how many days it’s been since her election, and why this is happening to her. They do it, sort of, in the same way that they do a lot of things, sort of. Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego did confront Johnson, once, and say, "Stop covering up for pedophiles." Johnson said, "That’s ridiculous." But different Democrats should be making Johnson say that every day.

Second, I suspect maybe the Democrats will give in next week. They hope that outrage about the lack of food stamps and especially the exploding health care subsidies will force the Republicans’ hand, and they might be right about that. But more likely, once actual people start actually suffering, it’s the Democrats who will sue for peace, because Democrats actually give a couple of shits about that, whereas Republicans couldn’t care less, because not caring less is their brand (unless those putting in the suffering time include, say, fossil fuel CEOs).

So maybe the Democrats will do that. But I think even if they do, and the shallow Politico "win the day" verdicts agree that the GOP won, Democrats can still win down the road. They fought for lower health care subsidies. They fought for the federal workforce. They fought for hungry families. They fought for the 812,000 residents of the 7th district of Arizona. OK, they lost, in the short term. But they fought.

Three months from now, when millions of Americans’ health care premiums have shot through the roof and millions of others have given up their coverage because they can no longer afford it, well, the Democrats can come back and show voters that this is what "victory" looks like, according to this alleged new party of the working class.

Last week’s quiz: "It can do what?!" A quiz on twentieth-century household inventions.

1. In what year did the first practical electric home vacuum cleaner appear on the U.S. market?

A. 1908

B. 1914

C. 1920

D. 1923

Answer: A, 1908. An earlier British version from 1901 was the size of a horse carriage and thus not terribly practical for the home. But in 1908, American James Spangler designed and marketed the first electric broomstick-like cleaner. Here’s the story.

2. The first freestanding and automatically controlled electric refrigerator appeared in the United States in 1918. Under what brand name did it appear?

A. General Electric

B. Kitchen Aid

C. Kelvinator

D. Frigidaire

Answer: C, Kelvinator. They just barely beat Frigidaire to the market. It apparently looked like this. Today, Kelvinator makes only commercial products, whereas I noticed that Frigidaire just introduced what appears to be the first line of home ovens that can crank up to 750 degrees, for more restaurant-like pizza-making. 

3. During what decade did dishwashers become common fixtures in American homes?

A. 1940s

B. 1950s

C. 1960s

D. 1970s

Answer: D, the ’70s. It seems it wasn’t until the Me Decade that dishwasher sizes became standardized and technological advances brought prices down. Even today, a surprisingly low 61 percent of U.S. households have dishwashers. And get this—20 percent of those never use them! What is that about? It seems that growing legions of consumers are perturbed at these interminable three-hour cycles, which I agree are ridiculous. A modern machine ought to be able to clean a load of dishes in about 13 minutes.

4. When did the touch-tone phone make its debut in the United States?

A. 1960

B. 1963

C. 1972

D. 1977

Answer: B, 1963. Bell Telephone first introduced them in the Pittsburgh area. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that touch-tone phones really took over from rotary phones. I remember that in the 1980s, I owned (you didn’t own your phones until early ’80s deregulation; the phone company owned them) a very cool see-through Plexiglass touch-tone phone that looked just like this.

5. The Amana Radar Range was among the first microwave ovens to come into widespread domestic use, starting in the early 1970s. How much did the Amana RR-4 cost in 1972 (today’s dollars in parentheses)?

A. $199.95 ($1,576)

B. $279.95 ($2,207)

C. $319.95 ($2,522)

D. $469.95 ($3,704)

Answer: D, $469.95. Can you imagine? You could literally buy a refrigerator for less. It looked like this. I remember we got our first one in around 1973 or ’74, for Christmas. One of the first things we cooked in it was an egg. We all gathered around the kitchen table to see how it came out. My cousin Johnnie poked it with a fork, and it exploded in his face.

6. Match the percentage of homes with central air conditioning to the correct European country.

Answer: 40 percent = Spain, 20 percent = France, 5 percent = the U.K., and 99 percent = Greece. That last one stands to reason as it’s the hottest. But the U.K., 5 percent? Wow. By the way, the United States is at 90 percent. Here are some global comparisons (India just 5 percent, yikes).

This week’s quiz: "Oh-oh they call him Mr. Touchdown …" A quiz, here in the heart of the season, with the air cooler and the leaves bronzed, about college football in popular culture. Don’t worry, you don’t have to know a thing about college football, just about popular culture. Also: It helps to be old!

1. Which 1932 Marx Brothers movie centered around a big college football game between Huxley University, where the recently named President Wagstaff (Groucho) was obsessed with victory, and archrival Darwin U.?

A. Duck Soup

B. Animal Crackers

C. Horse Feathers

D. Monkey Business

2. The 1940 movie Strike Up the Band explored tension between the male star, who played on the football team, and the female lead, who marched in the band. Who were this well-known duo?

A. Shirley Temple and "Spanky" McFarland
B. Elizabeth Taylor and Roddy McDowall
C. Deanna Durbin and Jackie Cooper
D. Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney

3. In Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick Pollitt, the favored son of Big Daddy but an alcoholic struggling with his sexual identity, had been a college football running back who starred in what bowl game?

A. The Orange Bowl
B. The Liberty Bowl
C. The Dixieland Bowl
D. The Cotton Bowl

4. A Johnny Mercer song that became a hit for Bing Crosby in 1950 celebrated the exploits of a titular star "player" for a West Virginia college who, as a clarinetist in the marching band, somehow led the team to a comeback win in the Rose Bowl. His last name was Jones. His first name?

A. Jackrabbit

B. Jamboree

C. Jellybean

D. Cornpone

5. In the Simpsons episode "The Great Wife Hope," from 2009, the evil Mr. Burns is seen performing what college fight song of his alma mater?

A. "Boola Boola" (Yale)

B. "Roar, Lion, Roar" (Columbia)

C. "Notre Dame Victory March" (Notre Dame)

D. "The Beaver Call" (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

6. A number of college teams use popular songs as a kind of signature tune—while taking the field or during a game’s big moments or after a win. Match the university to the song.

See? Not one football question. Answers next week. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com.

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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