On this page is a column by Sherry Brennan on the federal food stamp program or SNAP. Brennan writes about the cuts the Trump Administration seems determined to impose on a program that has put food on the tables of countless Americans over the decades.

Beyond the practical, SNAP also is an example of the way things should be — the way they used to be before too many of us decided that people were poor by choice and working with someone across the aisle ended in a political death sentence.

Some history:

No Republican can claim more credit for the food stamp program than former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas. In 1976, he joined with Sen. George McGovern, a Democrat, to craft legislation that President Jimmy Carter, also a Democrat, used the following year as a model for the reformed Food Stamp Act, which took important steps to simplify the program, reduce administrative costs and combat fraud.

More importantly, the program had a huge effect on the hunger and malnutrition medical researchers found in the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia’s coal fields and coastal South Carolina in the late 1960s.

The researchers returned in the late 1970s to find dramatic improvement in the health of the region’s children.“No program does more to lengthen and strengthen the lives of our people than the Food Stamp Program,” they concluded.

To ensure the support of his constituents — many of them farmers — Dole lobbied successfully to have the program placed under the authority of the U.S. Department of Agriculture with funding included in multi-year farm bills. The marriage of food stamps and farm bill benefits helped draw votes to agriculture from urban representatives without a farmer in their districts.

It’s a history our current representatives would do well to study. There is more to governing than opposition to anything the other side proposes and support for tax breaks for people who don’t need them.

“The program is a timely reminder that people of good will on both sides of the aisle can come together to make sound policy that improves the lives of tens of millions of their fellow Americans — a useful lesson in today’s highly fractured political environment,” Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities wrote in a September 2017 column.

Not a bad message as we start 2020.