Cruelty is the point again Remember André Bauer? He was the South Carolina lieutenant governor (Republican, naturally) who in 2010 compared government food assistance to the poor to feeding stray animals: “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals,” Bauer said during a town hall meeting, as the Greenville News reported over the weekend. “You know why? Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.” Bauer was saying the quiet part out loud before MAGA made it “conservative cool.” Cutting off poor people’s food is “a perennial Republican target,” observes Politicos’ Meredith Lee Hill. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy wants to use food assistance as leverage in his 2023 negotiations over raising the federal debt limit: McCarthy’s initial list calls for expanding the age bracket for people who must meet work requirements in order to participate in the Supplemental Nutrition Food Assistance Program or SNAP, while closing what Republicans say are “loopholes” in existing restrictions, according to two people who were granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Cutting spending on federal food assistance programs is a perennial Republican target, and House conservatives are eager to make it part of any agreement to raise the debt ceiling, which the…