U.S. Sen. Mark Warner didn’t mince words Thursday when talking about President Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
“This is the ugliest piece of legislation I’ve seen in my whole lifetime,” the Democrat and former Virginia governor said at a roundtable discussion at the Fredericksburg Regional Food Bank.
The event was held to talk about cuts to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly known as food stamps, in Trump’s law. But Warner also mentioned other funding decreases the administration has made to Medicaid and education.
He said that next month will see a fight over the federal budget, but he also expressed optimism that some Republican lawmakers may decide Trump’s bill was an overreach on some matters.
“I’ve spent my career priding myself on being bipartisan,” Warner said. “I have never felt the level of disappointment that I felt the last seven or eight months.”
The senator said some in the GOP privately told him that he’s their “conscience.”
But, Warner said, “I don’t want to be your damn conscience. I want you to vote your conscience.”
And he said, some Republicans have expressed the notion that they didn’t realize the severity of the Big, Beautiful Bill.
“We didn’t really know we were going to do that,” they say, according to Warner.
The lawmaker said he doesn’t believe they’re unpatriotic. He thinks the Republican Party has sold its soul — at least in the short term — to Trump.
“They’ve never been more intimidated,” Warner said.
However, Warner added he expects “some common sense” to return to his GOP colleagues.
And that wasn’t the only measure of hope discussed at a meeting where other elected and community leaders talked about programs that have worked as well as those that are in danger.
One of those programs was mentioned by Brian Kiernan, school nutrition director for Fredericksburg City Public Schools.
Kiernan talked about an effort in which he used grant funding to build four food trucks that brought meals to hungry children in the city.
“We did 2,000 … 2,200 meals a day doing this in the summer,” Kiernan said. “Hundred-degree heat didn’t matter to us. We just went out and did it.”
But, he said, a change in federal regulations meant that work couldn’t go on as it used to.
However, Kiernan continues his mission to feed schoolchildren.
“When a kid eats in the morning, or comes to lunch and eats, it generates a smile, and they learn in the classroom,” Kiernan said.
Cynthia Lucero-Chavez, the McKinney-Vento homeless liaison for Stafford County Public Schools, shared a story that demonstrated the needs of many in the community, and the positive outcomes that occur when programs work correctly.
Lucero-Chavez said she helped a mother of a 2-, 4- and 6-year-old who had been living in her car.
The woman’s SNAP benefit had run out a week before, but Lucero-Chavez got her set up at a hotel and then went to the grocery store with her.
The educator told the woman to get two carts — one for fun food and one for healthy options.
“‘You will pay for the fun food,’” Lucero-Chavez told her. “‘I will pay for the healthy food.’”
So, the pair read food labels and figured out how much items cost per ounce.
“We did a whole lesson in the store by the end of it,” Lucero-Chavez said. “She felt like she could do this, and we had a cart full of healthy food, she had a place to stay, we had a means for her to pick her children up from school because we couldn’t direct a bus because she had no address.”
Rep. Eugene Vindman, a Democrat who represents Virginia’s 7th Congressional District, also attended Thursday’s gathering.
He told the Free Press there’s an effort in Congress to pass a farm bill that could bring back programs that allow for nutritious food to be grown, supporting small farmers and providing nutrition to the community. It wouldn’t cover SNAP but would facilitate other, smaller programs.
Vindman, who represents the Fredericksburg area, was visiting his third food resource outlet of the day, having already been to operations in Manassas and Dumfries.
“So, you know, every place that I’ve been to, the clientele is increasing,” he said. “There are less resources, and it’s critically important that we press this issue.”
Also after the meeting, Warner reiterated to the Free Press that, though he doesn’t think tackling the issue of the federal budget will be easy, he does hold out some hope for positive actions by his friends across the aisle on some of the issues brought up by the Big, Beautiful Bill.
“Again, I do think there’s an opportunity that some of my colleagues realize that maybe this is gone too far,” he said.
