Federal judge orders the administration to pay full SNAP benefits by end of day; the administration runs to the Supreme Court.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program serves forty-two million Americans. It is, for many of them, what stands between Thursday and the food bank. The administration, during the shutdown, had decided unilaterally to pay only fifty percent of November benefits, then revised that to sixty-five percent, then said maybe nothing at all.

A federal judge in Rhode Island, on Thursday, said: pay one hundred percent. The contingency fund exists. Use it. By Friday.

The administration, instead, on Friday, asked the Supreme Court of the United States to please intervene because they did not want to pay one hundred percent. They wanted to pay sixty-five. While they were filing that emergency motion, the USDA sent a memo to the states telling them to undo any disbursements that had already gone out at full benefit. A second federal judge blocked that memo within hours.

Buddy. They asked the Supreme Court to please let them keep food away from forty-two million people. That is not a paraphrase. That is the actual filing.

I have run a casino floor. There is a thing in casino management called the House Always Pays principle. If a winner walks up to the cage with a winning ticket and the cage is short, you do not shut the cage. You do not call your lawyer. You go in the back, you find the cash, and you pay the man, because the alternative is not a casino, the alternative is a fraud. The House Always Pays.

The federal government had the contingency money. The federal government chose to litigate not paying it. The Supreme Court, late Friday, granted the administration a brief stay, on procedural grounds, that allowed it to keep withholding for the weekend. By the time the shutdown ended five days later, partial payments had gone out. Some states front-loaded. Some food banks ran dry.

Forty-two million people had a worse week because the people running the country wanted to win an argument with the people they were running the country for.

I’m arguing with the television again, and this one is at the volume the neighbors will mention.