The House’s Farm Bill Is a Perfect Disgrace

The Washington Post | Reader Supported News | July 15, 2013

The House has finally passed a farm bill, and we’ll start our discussion by listing the legislation’s good points. It won’t take long.

The bill ends the wasteful direct-payment programs that showered $5 billion per year on commodity producers without regard to need. It abolishes permanent agriculture laws dating back to the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, thus eliminating the twice-a-decade threat of chaotic price increases that farm lobbyists used to extract new subsidies. And, for the first time in many years, representatives passed agriculture-support programs separately from food stamps, ending the old log-rolling arrangement between urban and rural delegations that insulated both programs from scrutiny on the merits.

Other than that, the bill’s a perfect disgrace. Each of the above-mentioned pluses is more than offset by a corresponding defect. Yes, direct payments would end, but they’d be replaced with a 10-year, $9?billion increase in crop insurance programs that would protect farms against not only natural disasters but also inconvenient market movements – at a time when U.S. agriculture is enjoying record profits. The irrational New Deal-Fair Deal-era default rules would end, but this new law would never sunset, locking in not only the crop insurance bloat but also costly, unnecessary sugar and milk programs.

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Missing: The Food Stamp Program

Official portrait of United States House Speaker (R-Ohio). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

THE EDITORIAL BOARD | New York Times | July 12, 2013

“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.

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Boehner’s House Implodes Over Flawed Farm Bill

E.J. Dionne Jr. | The Washington Post | Reader Supported News | June 24, 2013

The roof fell in on John Boehner’s House of Representatives last week. The Republican leadership’s humiliating defeat on a deeply flawed and inhumane farm bill was as clear a lesson as we’ll get about the real causes of dysfunction in the nation’s capital.

Our ability to govern ourselves is being brought low by a witches’ brew of right-wing ideology, a shockingly cruel attitude toward the poor on the part of the Republican majority, and the speaker’s incoherence when it comes to his need for Democratic votes to pass bills.

Boehner is unwilling to put together broad bipartisan coalitions to pass middle-ground legislation except when he is pressed to the wall. Yet he and his lieutenants tried to blame last Thursday’s farm legislation fiasco – the product of a massive repudiation by GOP conservatives of their high command – on the Democrats’ failure to hand over enough votes.

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What Congress and the Media Are Missing in the Food Stamp Debate

Greg Kaufmann | The Nation | June 18, 2013

To follow the congressional debate about food stamp (SNAP) funding in the  Farm Bill—and media coverage of that debate—you would think that the relevant  issues are the deficit, rapists on food stamps, waste and abuse and defining our biblical obligation to the poor.

The only thing missing from that conversation is the state of hunger in  America today and how we should respond to it.

“A good part of the food stamp debate in Congress and the media is not an  evidence-based conversation, it’s fantasy-based,” says Jim Weill, president of  the Food Research and Action  Center (FRAC), a nonprofit organization working to improve public policies  to eradicate hunger in the United States.

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26 Lawmakers to Live off Food Stamps to Protest GOP Cuts

Rebecca Leber | ThinkProgress | Reader Supported News | June 14, 2013

Twenty-six members of Congress will live off of a food stamp budget this week to draw attention to House Republicans cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). The program’s eligibility requirements already leave out 50 million food insecure households, but another 2 million Americans would lose access to food stamps in the proposed changes for the Farm Bill.

The SNAP challenge means that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and 25 participating members must try to live off of under $4.50 per day for food and drink.

Lee detailed the tough decisions she made grocery shopping – butter and milk were outside her budget and a McDonalds value menu item will count as her midweek break – in a blog post. “What I’m thinking about most during this trip is that I’m shopping only for myself,” she wrote, comparing the difficult decisions now to when she needed public assistance as a single mother. “When I was a young, single mother, I was on public assistance. It was a bridge over troubled water, and without it, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I spent hours debating what to buy and what to skip, all the while keeping my sons in my mind.” Many Americans receiving SNAP benefits are under 18 years old and live in working households.

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Senate Passes Farm Bill; House Vote Is Less Sure

RON NIXON | New York Times | June 10, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Senate approved a sweeping new farm bill on Monday that will cost nearly $955 billion over the next 10 years, the first step in a renewed attempt at passing legislation that will set the country’s food and agriculture programs and policy.

The bill, which finances programs as diverse as crop insurance for farmers, food assistance for low-income families and foreign food aid, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, 66 to 27. The Senate passed a similar bill last year, but the House failed to bring its bill to a vote. The last farm bill that was passed by both chambers, in 2008, was extended until Sept. 30.

“The Senate today voted to support 16 million American jobs, to save taxpayers billions and to implement the most significant reforms to agriculture programs in decades,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan and chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. She was a co-author of the bill with Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi, the ranking Republican on the committee.

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Congress Is Ready to Fight Over Deep Food Stamp Cuts

George Zornick | The Nation | May 16, 2013

Late Wednesday night, the House Agriculture Committee passed  a comprehensive, $940 billion farm bill. This was a first step towards making a  real, five-year bill law—something the last Congress failed to do, and something  that, by all accounts, this Congress deems an absolute necessity.

But one central issue could derail the farm legislation once again: food  stamp cuts. Republicans are demanding even deeper cuts than what they proposed  last year, and Thursday morning on Capitol Hill, several House Democrats made it  clear they are willing to let the farm bill die if it contains those steep  cuts.

The bill passed by the House Agriculture Committee last night slashed $20.5  billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, $4 billion more than  what the committee proposed last year. These cuts would take away food stamps  from nearly 2 million  people, and several hundred thousand low-income children would stop  receiving free school meals.

At a press conference Thursday morning, several prominent Democrats drew red  lines around the cuts. “Lest anyone think that this [debate] is going quietly  into the night, you have another think coming,” said Representative Rosa  DeLauro. “Maybe, and I can’t say for sure, maybe we’ll take a look at whether  this bill can move at all.”

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