“We’ll get to that later.” That was the dismissive answer of Speaker John Boehner on Thursday, when asked if the House would restore the food stamp program it had just coldly ripped out of the farm bill. “Later,” he said, Republicans will deal with the nation’s most important anti-hunger program. “Later,” maybe, they will think about the needs of 47 million people who can’t afford adequate food, probably by cutting the average daily subsidy of $4.39.

But right then their priorities were clear, as a bare majority rushed to provide $195.6 billion over 10 years to Big Agriculture. Most of the money went to subsidies for crop insurance and commodities, demanded by the corn, rice and sugar barons who fill campaign coffers.

The choice made by the House in cutting apart the farm bill was one of the most brutal, even in the short history of the House’s domination by the Tea Party. Last month, the chamber failed to pass a farm bill that cut $20.5 billion from food stamps because that was still too generous for the most extreme Republican lawmakers. So, in the name of getting something — anything — done, Mr. Boehner decided to push through just the agriculture part of the bill.

For decades, farm subsidies and food stamps have been combined for simple reasons of political expediency. Farm-state lawmakers went along with food stamps to keep the crop subsidies flowing; urban lawmakers did the reverse. The coalition may have been an uneasy one, and it cost the taxpayers untold billions in wasteful payments to growers, but that was the price for helping the hungry.