CE Week #12: “Senate filibuster puts farm bill on hold”
Republicans accused of being obstructionist
|
Michael Doyle
McClatchy
November 17, 2007
WASHINGTON – Forget about a farm bill, for now.
An utterly stymied Senate on Friday failed to muster the votes needed to consider a $286 billion farm bill, making it much more likely that the package will get postponed into 2008.
The delay alarms fruit and vegetable growers, who seek a record increase in federal spending.
Farm-state senators aren’t too happy, either.
“It may slip into next year; I don’t know,” conceded Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.
Harkin, the chairman of the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee, mustered 55 votes to break a filibuster. He needed 60. Partisanship prevailed, as every Democrat voted to proceed and all 42 votes to block the bill came from Republicans.
The 55-42 filibuster vote Friday capped 10 days of inaction, during which time the farm bill remained inert on the Senate floor. Although 260-plus amendments have been drafted, many unrelated to farm policy, senators remain split over substance, process and politics.
The Senate now embarks on a two-week Thanksgiving vacation, during which time farm organizations will pressure GOP lawmakers. If motivated, Harkin insisted, Senate leaders still could solve their problems in early December and start negotiations with the House of Representatives before Christmas.
“We just want them to get on with it,” said Jack King, the manager of national affairs for the California Farm Bureau Federation. “Why wait?”
The Californians have joined with growers in Florida, Michigan, Washington and other specialty-crop states to promote increased spending on fruits and vegetables. A House farm bill approved in late July offers $1.7 billion for specialty crops.
The Senate proposal offers $2 billion for specialty crops, with about half of the total paying for school snack and lunch purchases. Both the House and Senate legislation would provide four or five times the level of specialty-crop funding included in the current farm bill, which expires this year.
If agreement cannot be reached on a new bill, Congress could extend the current legislation. But that would postpone indefinitely the gains for farmers, food stamp recipients and rural communities contained in the new legislation.
“If we have a continuation of the current farm bill, we have no provisions for half of the crops in the country, the fruits and vegetables,” warned Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich.
Well over half of the farm bill’s total spending goes toward food-stamp and nutrition programs. Both House and Senate bills largely continue traditional subsidies for crops, including cotton, rice, wheat and corn, though with some modifications.
Many Republicans like the underlying farm bill, which won unanimous approval from the 21-member Senate Agriculture Committee. Nonetheless, they kept it bottled up Friday out of solidarity with other GOP colleagues who want to offer amendments on hot-button political issues. One potential amendment, for instance, would bar illegal immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses.
Another potential amendment would bar crop subsidies to residents of San Francisco; New Haven, Conn.; and other self-designated “sanctuary” cities that harbor illegal immigrants. Other proposals range from cutting estate taxes to granting firefighters collective bargaining rights.
Senate Democratic leaders want limited amendments, all germane to agriculture. In part, this keeps manageable a bill that already spans 1,600 pages and avoids amendments primarily designed to force politically awkward votes.
“If you want to offer this on some other bill, on an immigration bill, fine,” Harkin said. “But not on the farm bill.”
Stalling the farm bill also can serve some political purposes. Stabenow charged Republicans with pursuing a “strategy to block us from achieving anything,” while Harkin contended that the White House’s Capitol Hill allies want to protect the president from making a politically sensitive veto.
White House officials say the Senate bill is packed with taxes and “budget gimmicks,” and they want changes, including stricter limits on which farmers get subsidies. The Senate bill, for instance, prohibits subsidies to farmers with gross annual incomes over $750,000. The White House wants this cut to $200,000.
“To put it simply, I believe our farmers and ranchers deserve and need something better,” Acting Agriculture Secretary Chuck Conner said this week.
Fruit and vegetable farmers depend on the subsidy government funds to supplement their crop profits, but the expected delay in the farm bill could seriously hamper the industry’s production. If the bill doesn’t make it through the Senate, specialty crop prices may soar even higher to counteract the lacking federal financial assistance. Despite the party rivalries, the politicians should recognize the effect of their selfish objectives and for the sake of the agricultural community, focus on the bill alone while making their decision. All of the pork barelling politics that has nothing to do with the bill’s purpose and only causes more divisions on the decision and delays to come. If the republicans insist on adding their own provisions into the amendments of the bill, they should at least try to make them somewhat relevant to original intent so that it does not cause so much argument. The vote will never reflect the actual opinion on the farm bill as long as the political amendments are clouding the Senators ability to judge it solely based on the rural farming implications and the effect of the 286 billion dollar cost on top of the already excessive deficit. Additionally, the party alliances destroy individual thinking and award the party with the greatest representation extraordinary power so long as they only vote based on affiliation rather than personal opinions and important deductions about each bill’s positive and negative effects.
Shocker shocker: the Republicans are out to get poor people again.
Yeah, half the bill’s funding went to food stamp recipients, or, as the republicans see them, lazy, no-good, half-blooded, drugged up leaches on the public good, or, as the democrats see them, people. That’s right, Republicans hate poor people. It’s no coincidence that they choose this bill to attach hot-button rider amendments to. Freakin’ driver’s licenses. This is holding poor people hostage, at gun-point, in front of the democrats and saying, “you see those illegal immigrants over there, yeah, we’re gonna screw ‘em. Any quick moves and the poor folks {and this part coming up is really with some solid disdain} Whom You Love So Much get it! The worst part: the partisanship. Even republicans who like the bill voted to not let it get discussed because they’re on the side of the wacked out guy with the gun who hasn’t shaved in three days and still has some dried milk stuck on his ratty stubble and what’s that on his coat, it’s pink and crusty, a stain, he probably spilled pepto-bismol, oh now that I’m looking closer I see lost of stain’s, but the pepto’s pink so it stands out even from the five feet behind him I’m standing so hopefully the democrats and my common-sense electorate won’t piece together that I’m with this guy.
Then they guy with the gun says, “Hey, while we’re at it might as well stick it to the gays, too, because they gross me out. Hey democrats… There’s nothing you can do about it! Unless, that is, you want to vote against the biggest expansion of logical farm subsidies, and, oh yeah, want me to shoot all of these poor people!!!”