Republicans have a well-honed ability to take a phrase that means something important to Americans and suck the life out of it. Congressman Juan Ciscomani carried out one of these delicate procedures last Thursday in the Sixth Congressional District debate when he drained meaning from the well-known words “social safety net.” The country has had safety net programs for decades, aimed at using government resources to protect the vulnerable in our society — families living below the poverty line, children, and the elderly, for example.
The debate moderator asked Ciscomani about the effects on the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (still familiar to many as “food stamps”). The congressman voted in support of severely cutting eligibility for the program. Ciscomani’s response wandered, but he did say that the bill “tightens the requirements to make sure that SNAP benefits are delivered to the people that actually need it and we protect it for those families that need it. Single moms, people with disabilities both on Medicaid and SNAP, we want to make sure we protect that safety net for the people.”
The safety net for food security now created by the One Big Beautiful Bill (yes, that’s its actual name), which passed the House of Representatives last year by a single vote (Ciscomani’s, you could say — he voted for it) has thrown state-administered SNAP programs into disarray. It’s resulted in many families, including those headed by single mothers, losing their eligibility. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities keeps track of participants, state by state, and the numbers for Arizona are the worst. The CBPP finds that SNAP enrollment here in the year since bill was passed has fallen by more than 50 percent, meaning over 450,000 Arizonans, including 200,000 children no longer receive food support.
Ciscomani can throw around the term “safety net,” but he and his Republican colleagues in Congress through the One Big Beautiful Bill have left the net full of gigantic holes, through which Americans are falling.
The OBBB, passed with GOP celebration (but no Democratic votes) in 2025, has proven to be massively unpopular in voter polls, so Republican campaigners are even shying away from the name. For Ciscomani and others, the OBBB is now the “Working Families Tax Cut Act”, since it produces short term tax deductions on tip and overtime income. The Tax Foundation, a respected analyzer of US tax policy, estimated that the two provisions that Ciscomani touted in the debate would produce refunds in the counties he represents ranging from $248 in Cochise to $448 in Greenlee.
That’s not nothing, of course, but the advantage to the ordinary taxpayer pales in comparison with the tax cuts the OBBB (or the “Who Cares About the Working Families Act?”, if you prefer) lavished on the wealthier part of the population and their corporate businesses. The Politico website reported this week that “Budget forecasters say [federal tax] payments are down 25%, or $96 billion, after falling 15% last year. That’s fueling complaints those investment breaks are providing a windfall for the tech world, and giving a bad deal to taxpayers as Google, Microsoft and others would be spending oodles of cash on AI regardless of the tax incentives.”
And so, with Republicans in charge of both the Trump Administration and Congress, the rich get significantly richer and the poor lose food stamps. And, Medicaid cuts authorized by the OBBB are right around the corner. Meanwhile, Ciscomani claimed in the debate that the bill’s goal was to “strengthen the safety net for so many families that need it.”
By saying that Ciscomani reduces the idea that has underpinned American society for generations to mere candidate babble. This man supported taking food away from 200,000 children in Arizona. He is not morally qualified to represent our community. By the way, when confronted directly in his Washington, DC, office building by a Tucson mom who’d lost her SNAP help, he let the elevator in which he was standing whisk him away.
What can you do about this? Vote for his opponent, JoAnna Mendoza, that’s what.
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