House Narrowly Passes Parred-back Farm Bill

House Narrowly Passes Parred-back Farm Bill
The US House of Representatives narrowly passed a farm bill that does not include funding for SNAP (food stamps), but will allow the House to conference with the Senate on agricultural reform.

Farm bill 2013: House narrowly passes pared-back version
By: David Rogers
July 11, 2013

"The House narrowly passed a pared-back farm bill Thursday after Republican leaders stripped out the nutrition title — affecting food stamps and local food banks — to win back conservative votes.

The 216-208 roll call avoids a repeat of last month’s embarrassing collapse and for the first time in a year will allow House-Senate talks on a final farm package.

All but 12 Republicans supported the measure — in contrast with the 62 defections in June. And it was a badly needed, face-saving win for Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), whose tactics contributed to last month’s loss and who had bet heavily on the new approach to recover.

Nonetheless, the decision to jettison the nutrition title breaks with nearly a half-century of precedent. And the GOP victory came at a huge political cost, splitting American agriculture and driving a wedge between urban and rural lawmakers who have long worked together on farm legislation.

All 196 Democrats voted in opposition, and there was a genuine fury displayed by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who repeatedly delayed the emotional floor proceedings. The intense partisanship and often tone-deaf management of the past month have fed into doubts in Cantor’s own party over his temperament as a would-be speaker.

“Farm bills have been bipartisan for generations, and we made it a mess,” said one senior Republican. In the process, the GOP gave up precious leverage to enact nutrition reforms in talks with the Senate. And dozens of fiscal conservatives, who complained about the high cost of the farm bill last month, were pressured to switch their votes when the only change was removing food aid for the poor.

“This is a victory for farmers and conservatives who desired desperately needed reforms to these programs,” Cantor said in a statement. But a solid phalanx of outside groups, like The Heritage Foundation, Club for Growth and Taxpayers for Common Sense, remained opposed to the level of commodity and crop insurance subsides in the bill.

Significant reforms are made, including the termination of direct cash payments to producers. But the 10-year cost is $195.6 billion, and the commodity title goes much further than the Senate in using government-set target prices as a safety net for farmers.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) had initially resisted the split-bill strategy but signed on this week in a last-ditch effort to get something to conference with the Senate. To drive home the same point, Speaker John Boehner’s chief of staff, Mike Sommers, held a conference call with farm groups in which he warned that failure would doom any chance of a farm bill this year.

Powerful cotton, rice, peanut and sugar cane interests worked with Lucas and the GOP to round up votes. But the two leading agriculture groups — the American Farm Bureau Federation and National Farmers Union — came out against the GOP strategy. And Thursday morning, the typically conservative AFBF leadership sent a letter urging lawmakers to vote no on the bill."

Read the fulll article by David Rogers at Politico