Vice President JD Vance pushed back on Thursday against a ruling by a federal judge that the Trump administration must pay full Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits during the government shutdown, calling it "absurd."

U.S. District Judge John McConnell made the ruling on Thursday morning, rejecting a plan by the administration to partially fund the program with funds already on hand.

“It’s an absurd ruling because you have a federal judge effectively telling us what we have to do in the middle of a Democrat government shutdown,” Vance said from the White House, where he was taking part in a roundtable with Central Asian leaders.

“What we’d like to do is for the Democrats to open up the government of course, then we can fund SNAP and we can also do a lot of other good things for the American people,” Vance said. “But in the midst of a shutdown we can’t have a federal court telling the president how he has to triage the situation.”

Appeal pending

The DOJ said it would appeal the ruling, which means SNAP recipients still don't know whether they will get some, all, or none of their benefits this month.

Meanwhile, food banks and other community resources have been stretched to the limit by those who are already in need after not getting their payments on November 1.

McConnell ruled last week that the administration was required to use up a $5 billion contingency fund to pay out the benefits, but around $9 billion is needed to pay out to all 42 million Americans that receive them.

This is after Trump already shifted funds to pay the military and the WIC nutritional program for women and children.

Longest shutdown ever

The shutdown is now the longest in history, at 37 days on Friday.

Vance said that the administration would seek to fund programs “according to what we think we have to do to comply with the law, of course, but also to actually make the government work for people.”

Of course, the government should not be relied upon to feed people--that should be the churches and individuals helping each other.

Relying on the government is bound to fail, but now we have 42 million relying to some extent on the ability of politicians to get over themselves and their own political ambitions (Sen. Chuck Schumer D-NY) to do the right thing.

How we got here

First the government gave out "stimulus checks" and small business loans during the pandemic and printed more than $6 trillion dollars to do so, which made inflation spin out of control.

Now, most products people buy every day are roughly double what they were in 2020, not 30% more as the government claims inflation was over that period.

The government (Democrats) made tens of millions of Americans dependent on it for food and healthcare, for starters, and now it is being stripped away. It's a hard lesson to learn, but hopefully people will pull themselves up and do what they need to to make it without government help going forward.