"Obama agenda, meet the wrecking ball," the Daily Beast's Patricia Murphy groused as she opened her January 7 piece, "The Republican War on Kale." Murphy took issue with Senate Republicans setting their sights on a wildly unpopular element of the Obama agenda: the federal overhaul of school-lunch programs all over the country.
Of course, the changes borne about by the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 are wildly unpopular with both Democratic and Republican parents across the fruited plain, as well as their longsuffering apolitical children. Sure, the issue may be a bit populist and somewhat low-hanging fruit, but it's more than fair game, and Murphy certainly has to know that.
Nonetheless, the veteran political journalist set out to paint the "war on kale" as more about political sour grapes rather than a legitimate redress of federal government overreach into state and local authority (emphasis mine):
Obama agenda, meet the wrecking ball. That’s what many of the president’s key legislative accomplishments will face when Republicans take the reins of Senate committees this week. Among the items that incoming Republican committee chairmen are likely to try to tweak, block, change, or kill entirely: the Affordable Care Act, Dodd-Frank banking regulations, the executive order giving legal status to some undocumented immigrations, and administration plans to normalize diplomatic relations with Cuba.
But few of the Obama-approved initiatives in the GOP’s sites are as personal to the White House, or as unpopular with Republicans, as portions of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, legislation championed by first lady Michelle Obama in 2010 to make school lunches in American schools healthier as a part of her efforts to battle the country’s rampant rate of childhood obesity.
But where the first lady saw a chance to give kids nutritious meals they might otherwise never eat, some Republicans saw the ultimate Obama Nanny State, literally the government telling your kids to eat their vegetables.
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When House Republicans moved last year to roll back some of the provisions, the first lady wrote a rare New York Times op-ed, scolding the GOP for trying to undo the changes. “Our children deserve so much better than this,” she wrote. Despite her personal pitch, several exemptions to the rules were buried deep inside the “Cromnibus” government funding bill that passed Congress last month.
But the highest hurdle for the revamped school meals may lie ahead, as the GOP-led Congress takes up legislation to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act, which will includes the National School Lunch Program. The man in charge of that process for Republicans will likely be Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), the incoming chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
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Rep. John Kline (R-MN), who will lead the GOP effort in the House, has also criticized the lack of flexibility for schools and is expected to make his own push to roll back some or all of the regulations when he oversees the Child Nutrition re-authorization on the House side this year.
“This is a federal mandate that is causing some real problems for schools across the country,” Kline told a CBS affiliate in July. “They’re looking for flexibility, not fights over whether a white potato is a vegetable.”
