From Pacific Daily News:
Providing cash assistance to Guam’s elderly and people with disabilities could cause inflation here, according to the Justice Department, which argued it therefore is reasonable for Congress to deny Supplemental Security Income benefits to U.S. citizens living on Guam.
Denying local eligibility for SSI benefits also is reasonable because of the island’s unique tax relationship with the federal government, the Justice Department stated in a brief filed late last week with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The Justice Department is challenging a June 2020 ruling by District Court of Guam Chief Judge Frances Tydingco-Gatewood, who said denying SSI payments to Guam resident Katrina Schaller, a woman with a disability, is discriminatory and unconstitutional. The judge prohibited the federal government from continuing to enforce the discriminatory provisions against Schaller. ...
3 comments:
How quickly can we clear out the Trumpers from Justice Department?
This has nothing to do with Trumpers (though that is honestly as speciously Trump-esque a legal argument as any I have ever heard of).
It has more to do with the fact that the US Government doesn't want anything to do with extending the SSI program to Puerto Rico, and denying SSI to all the US Territories allows them to avoid doing that.
Guam is small potatoes, as are all the US Territories. Except Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has 10 times the population of all the other US Territories together, and by population (just shy of 3.2 million) is the 31st largest US State/Territory in the Union (population is slightly less than Utah, but is more than Iowa). It also has a poor standard of living that makes even the poorest US southern states look like paradises in comparison. Adding it to the SSI program could result in obligations to pay benefits to numbers of beneficiaries that would dwarf those of multiple poor southern US States with associated high admin costs.
And, I won't even touch the racist overtones that exist with respect to the population there. We saw how the population there was treated when Hurricane Maria leveled the island back in 2017, and the fact that they still haven't received even a fraction of the resources given to Louisiana is a national disgrace.
So, the argument is that the speculative possibility of a little inflation justifies denying benefits needed to secure basic living needs for the most poor disabled and elderly people in the territories? The same benefit that people in the states can get? That sounds like the kind of argument that should be made by the Department of Oppression and Discrimination, not the Department of Justice.
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