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Instead of Drug-Testing, Rep. May Wants SNAP Recipients to Serve as Child Support Cops

I must still be a conservative: most of the time, I end up measuring the success of the South Dakota Legislature by what they don’t do rather than what they do do… since far too much of what they do do is doo-doo.

Representative Elizabeth May (R-27/Kyle) appears to have changed her mind about reintroducing her useless and counter-evidential plan to test welfare recipients for drugs. Rep. May is prime sponsor of ten bills, and none ask food stamp recipients to pee in a cup. What a relief!

However, Rep. May is co-sponsoring a suspicious-looking bill dealing with the SNAP eligibility. House Bill 1191 adds one sentence to our state food stamp statutes:

The Department of Social Services shall require each person to cooperate with the Division of Child Support as a condition of eligibility, pursuant to 7 C.F.R. § 273.11(o).

The subsection of federal statute cited allows state agencies to disqualify custodial parents from SNAP if they don’t cooperate with state child support enforcement programs. “Cooperation” means helping the Division of Child Support “in establishing paternity of the child, and in establishing, modifying, or enforcing a support order.”

On would think that any measure increasing the power and information available to the Division of Child Support would draw the fire of the grouchy non-custodial dads who have been fighting other simple measures to adjust child support calculations for cost of living and make full-time work definitions more objective. But non-custodial parents are addressed in a separate subsection; thus, HB 1191 would not appear to force non-custodial low-income dads to assist the child support division that some of them view with such loathing. Interestingly, Mr. Down-with-Child-Support himself, Rep. Tom Pischke, is co-sponsoring HB 1191.

Rep. May gets to explain her desire for SNAP recipients to serve as child support cops to House Health and Human Services this morning at 7:45.