At a time when conservatives are positioning themselves as defenders of the Catholic Church on religious liberties and contraception, they seem to be far off from the Church’s teachings on other public policy issues.

While many conservatives belittle and mock anyone who takes assistance from the government, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sent a letter to lawmakers this week urging them not to cut funding for social safety net programs that help the poor, many of which have been targeted by Republican lawmakers in their quest to implement austerity to reduce the budget deficit.

“We fear the pressure to cut vital programs that protect the lives and dignity of the poor and vulnerable will increase,” wrote Bishops Stephen Blaire and Richard Pates, the Chairmen of the Committee on Domestic Justice and the Committee on International Justice, respectively.

Specifically, they singled out spending on health care, Pell Grants, affordable housing — which they called “essential for human dignity” — and food stamps. Just today, Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) panel on government oversight held a hearing on food stamp fraud that critics saw as pretense to gin up sentiment in favor of making cuts to the program.

And as many lawmakers are trying to undo the defense cuts contained in the “sequestration” triggered by last summer’s debt ceiling deal, the bishops suggested that defense should not be spared while social programs get cut:

We are also very concerned with proposals to eliminate the “firewall” that currently exists between defense and nondefense spending. Elimination of this firewall would mean that poverty-related domestic and international programs would compete with other more powerful interests and less essential priorities.

Read the full letter here.

Congressional leaders last night agreed to a $1 trillion bill to fund the government, averting a shutdown that would have started at midnight tonight. The bill reportedly dropped many of the unrelated policy riders that House Republicans had tried to insert into it.

However, the bill does include a cut to the Pell Grant program that could affect up to 100,000 low-income students. Republicans have been pushing for months to slash the Pell Grant program — which provides low-income students with money for higher education — and to limit it’s eligibility requirements. Though the maximum grant will be preserved under the spending deal, students on the edges of eligibility will be out of luck next year:

The bill, HR 3671, draws from ideas put forward in Republican and Democratic spending plans earlier this year: it would preserve the maximum Pell Grant at $5,550, but change the program’s eligibility criteria, making as many as 100,000 of its 9 million recipients ineligible. The grants could be used for a total of 12 semesters, not 18, as in the past — a change that would affect an estimated 62,000 beneficiaries and take effect July 1, 2012. Higher education lobbyists said the limit would apply to any semesters a student was enrolled, rather than only those in which he or she attended full-time, as they had originally thought.

The maximum amount families could earn and automatically contribute nothing toward an undergraduate education would decrease from $30,000 to $23,000.

The plan also retroactively limits the number of semesters that a student can use grants, meaning some students a semester or two away from graduation could see their grants dry up. The Institute for College Access and Success said that these changes “would disproportionately affect black students and transfer students.” The education reform organization Education Trust also criticized the cuts, saying that they “will hit some of America’s most disadvantaged college students the hardest.”

At the same time that Republicans so adamantly opposed a surtax on income in excess of $1 million that Democrats ultimately dropped it from the negotiations, it’s disheartening that one of the few things the two parties could agree on was cutting a program that is key to America’s education competitiveness.

House Republicans have tried over and over again to cut the Pell Grant program, which provides higher education grants to low- and middle-income students. Though the grants are not even keeping up with the ever-climbing cost of tuition, Republicans have repeatedly tried to take an axe to the program, with the latest example being a budget bill that would cause 1 million students to lose their access to Pell entirely.

But their straightforward attempts to reduce Pell have not gotten through the Senate, so the House GOP is now talking an alternative route — gaming the budget process to force cuts in the program. As Stephen Steigleder and Julie Margetta Morgan noted, House Republicans are trying to unilaterally change the budget scoring rules used for the Pell Grant program to make it look like the program has a large shortfall, thus necessitating giant cuts:

According to existing Pell scoring rules, Congress is required to enact sufficient funding to cover the full cost of Pell Grants for the upcoming award year — in this case, award year 2012-2013 — along with any funding shortfall incurred in prior years. [...]

But the House Budget Committee is blatantly ignoring the Pell scoring rule and threatening to substitute its own partisan analysis. The committee claims that all budget authority for Pell Grants in award year 2012‑2013 must originate in fiscal year 2012. The committee’s flawed interpretation of Pell scoring rules would exclude $896 million in savings from fiscal year 2013—even though savings from fiscal year 2013 would accrue at the same time Pell Grant funding is expended in award year 2012-2013.

Put simply, the House Budget Committee is inventing new rules as it goes along. The committee is trying to change the Pell scoring rule to exclude $896 million in legitimate offsets—thereby forcing Congress to cut an equal amount of funding from the Pell Grant program.

Looking at the calendar for both the government’s fiscal year and the Pell Grant award year, it’s clear that the GOP’s claim that all funding for Pell’s 2012-2013 year must come from 2012 is nonsensical. In fact, large portions of the 2012-2013 Pell awards will have to be paid out right in the midst of the government’s 2013 fiscal year, making the 2013 budget an entirely appropriate place to budget for them:

In short, there is no reason for the GOP to force all of the offsets for the 2012-2013 Pell program to come from the 2012 budget, other than their desire to make it look like Pell has a huge shortfall and needs to be scaled back. But with college debt heading towards record heights and America’s educational attainment beginning to trail other nations, there is no excuse for cutting aid to students.

Speaking today at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, where he was interrupted by 99 Percent Movement protesters, House Majority Leader (R-VA) fielded a question from a student asking why Cantor and the GOP support “reducing or getting rid of Pell Grants,” the federal grants that help low- and middle-income students pay for higher education.

Cantor disputed the claim, saying, “your direct question, allegation, I don’t know is accurate,” before launching into a non-answer about how the real issue is not the grants but the increasing cost of higher education. Watch it:

In fact, since coming to power, the House Republican majority — led by Cantor — has repeatedly set its sights on Pell Grants. Republican lawmakers have not only proposed lowering the maximum Pell amount from $5,500 (which is the level to which the Obama administration raised it) but also limiting eligibility, knocking one million students from the Pell program entirely. Republicans claim “we don’t have the money” to afford the grants, but the same House GOP budget that made cuts to Pell — for which Cantor voted — provides huge tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations that dwarf the cost of preserving the grants.

It’s also worth nothing that it was Cantor himself who, during July budget talks with the White House, proposed a cut “aimed squarely at college students” that would make students stat paying interest on their federal loans right away, instead of deferring until after graduation.

At a time when student loan debt is hitting new heights and joblessness is above 9 percent, Cantor’s response to a student genuinely concerned about financing his higher education is quite telling, especially when the GOP leader claims to agree that “the investment on higher education has an infinite return.”

House Education Committee Chairman John Kline (MN)

American college students will hit a milestone this year by having a record $1 trillion in student loan debt. Aware of the burden, President Obama announced a plan to help college students reduce their loan debt by consolidating their loans and lowering the maximum required loan payment from 15 percent of a student’s income to 10 percent. Debt would be forgiven after 20 years, instead of 25. The plan could help millions of students by lowering monthly payments by hundreds of dollars.

Naturally, Republican lawmakers are slamming the plan. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called it a “Ponzi scheme.” Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN) called it an “abuse of power” that creates a “moral hazard.”

House Education Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN), meanwhile, insisted that the plan actually “means more debt for students” because it encourages “more borrowing.” Kline continued his rant this morning on Fox and Friends, calling the executive order “a mistake” that will only “encourage” borrowing that leaves “taxpayers holding the bag”:

KLINE: This is a mistake. It’s very confusing. I’ve talked to a lot of people about what the president proposal is, it’s very difficult to figure out. Some of the changes are going to affect a very small group of students, some of them are going to affect a larger group of students. All of it we’ll encourage more borrowing, I’m afraid, and leave taxpayers holding the bag. [...]

We’ve seen the cost of college go up and up and up. Tuition and fees. The colleges and universities are going to have to face the fact that there is not an endless supply of money coming from state and federal governments. They’re going to have to look at their own operating costs and start to curtail the costs of going to college. We simply can’t keep providing money from the federal government in the form of subsidized or actual loans and Pell grants when we don’t have the money.

Watch it:

Kline noted that the executive order is “technically legal, but it is a stretch for him to do this and it was not the intent of Congress to do this at this time.” But the fact that Republicans don’t wish to address the record amount of student loan debt should not be surprising.

As TP Economy editor Pat Garofalo notes, the GOP “vigorously opposed reforms that stopped billions of federal dollars from going to banks to act as unnecessary middlemen in the federal student loan program.” They called the elimination of corporate welfare a “Washington takeover” of the industry. Pair that with Republcians’ callous cuts to the Pell Grant program and it’s easy to see that, whatever Kline and the GOP intend to do, it has nothing to do with helping students.