GOP leaders may squash farm bill
By Jake Sherman, July 12, 2012
The House Agriculture Committee has given birth to a 600-page farm bill that Republican leaders seem to want nothing to do with. And just months from Election Day, it could prove to be a headache for House GOP leadership.
The bipartisan bill, which united Democrats, hardened conservatives, farmers and food stamp reformers in committee, is unlikely to see a floor vote, more than a half-dozen sources said.
Publicly, Speaker John Boehner has been coy about bringing the farm bill to the floor — it would be messy, aides say, pitting regional and ideological interests against one another other in an election year. Officially, Boehner said “no decisions have been made” about if and when to bring it to the floor.
Behind the scenes, the plan is far clearer.
The committee’s product won’t see the light of day. Instead, Republicans are likely to try to extend the current farm policy that they’ve consistently decried as broken. And they won’t even do it this month, GOP aides say — they’ll likely wait until September.
The reality is that GOP leaders are worried about a messy floor fight over divisive regional policies months before voters head to the ballot boxes. Odd couples could abound: The far left and far right would likely vote against the bill on the floor, the former thinking the bill cuts too much from food stamps, the latter insisting cuts aren’t deep enough. There’s also division over how much the government should be subsidizing the farm industry and whether it should control commodity prices. Arguing complex farm policy on the House floor in this political climate gives many Republican members pause.
If the House can’t pass a bill, then it would go into negotiations with the Senate with a weak negotiating stance.
And that’s why this will be another chapter of griping from the rank and file about the leadership. Rural lawmakers, whose districts are dotted with farms and cattle, have long been talking about their desire to reform the nation’s agricultural policy. Not to mention that the droughts that have swept through the Midwest could add pressure to move on this legislation.
Now, they’ll likely have to grit their teeth and vote to extend current policy. And that will come only after rural lawmakers go home for all of August and face questions about why the bill hasn’t been debated on the House floor.
There are also concerns in the Senate that the upper chamber won’t be able to pass a simple extension.
GOP leadership’s noncommittal stance is already chafing House Republicans.
“Bring this bill to the floor — fast,” said Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King, who is running for reelection against Christie Vilsack, the wife of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “I would’ve been happy to bring this to the floor last night, the minute it passed out of committee.”
King, who sits on the committee and voted for the bill, has a northwestern Iowa district filled with corn growers, soybean producers, cattle, hogs and turkeys. King refuses to even entertain the idea that his leadership would extend current policy. He said he would be “terribly disappointed if we don’t have floor time to debate this ag bill.”
“They should’ve stood up and told everybody before we went through 14 or 15 hours of a markup where we beat each other up,” King told POLITICO Thursday afternoon. “To put everybody through that, if leadership didn’t want to put this on the floor, that would be something that would cause considerable anger among Democrats and Republicans.”
That feeling reaches across Chairman Frank Lucas’s Agriculture Committee.
“The American people deserve to have a vote,” said Rep. Reid Ribble, a Wisconsin Republican on the committee. “At this point, the bill came out. What are we going to do? The Senate has a bill passed. I’d rather work with our actual language so we aren’t in the same situation as we were on the highway bill.”
The gripes are not only from the Midwest, and the angst of these Republicans shows that some of them simply want to be able to show constituents that they’re doing something good for the folks back home.
“This is ready to be brought to the floor now,” said Rep. Tom Rooney (R-Fla.), who also sits on the committee. “Let’s debate it and move forward. It’s a five-year bill. The farmers of my district are expecting us to do our job.”
Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp, who voted against the committee bill because it didn’t have enough cuts from food stamp programs, has a farm show Friday at noon in his massive Kansas district, which has the most agribusiness in the nation.
“It’s going to have a problem on the floor,” Huelskamp told POLITICO. “On one hand, we don’t have enough food stamp savings for most Republicans, and too much for most Democrats. We have a dairy and sugar policy a lot of folks are not comfortable with.”
It’s not like the House is doing anything else that will become law this month: It’s mostly a political schedule that includes votes on defense spending, regulation slashing and tax cuts. There were some rumblings Thursday afternoon that the House would take up an extension of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act this month.
Farm policy isn’t the only issue falling out of focus this summer. A plan by Rep. Darrell Issa’s Oversight and Government Reform Committee to rework the United States Postal Service is likely to drop, as well. The Postal Service is on the brink of bankruptcy.
If Congress were to somehow agree on a new farm bill, it would have to do so this summer, lawmakers say. If they wait until September, they’ll run into a new crop year.
The old policy runs out Sept. 30.
Members of the Agriculture Committee warn of political peril if GOP farm policy isn’t enacted.
“We have a lot of folks that won with 55 percent and less in rural areas,” Huelskamp said, adding his district would be content with an extension of current policy.
Boehner, personally, seems cool about provisions of the bill that many of his members are touting. While he praised Lucas, he called the bill’s dairy policy “Soviet-style” and said “one of the proposals in the farm bill would actually make it worse.”
Ribble, whose state is filled with dairy farms, said he has a solution for the speaker.
“The speaker has a way to address it,” Ribble said. “And it’s on the floor.”
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