Earlier this summer, we watched the unexpectedly high-drama saga of the “farm bill” play out in Congress, and when lawmakers reconvene next week, it’s going to be a major action item that the leadership will want to wrap up before the current legislation expires at the end of September — even as the looming budget battle and the Syria debacle will probably occupy a lot of attention.
Here’s your refresher course on the pending status of the new legislation, as succinct as I can make it: The “farm bill” has traditionally contained both “agriculture policy,” ahem, and the outline for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (i.e., food stamps) — the deliberately omnibus design usually helps to ensure the passage of both urban and rural interests’ favored programs and protect the status quo. The budget for food stamps has more than doubled in just five years, but the Senate passed a renewed version of the farm bill that made only the most miniscule, practically nonexistent spending cuts possible to the food stamps program (read: an oh-so-brave and far-sighted $400 million/year out of an annual budget of now almost $80 billion). The House then took their turn at crafting matching legislation, and came up with a version that dared to make the wildly draconian cut of $2 billion a year, gasp, to food stamps. The White House immediately shot the idea down, but the issue suddenly and dramatically became moot when the House itself rejected the omnibus package with bipartisan opposition. Out of nowhere, lawmakers where suddenly talking about divorcing “agriculture policy” and food stamps into two more transparent bills, and for one brief, shining moment, it looked like we might get both some serious and reasonable cuts to both food stamps and the egregious corporate welfare divvied out to theagriculture sector and their many lobbies… But then, House Republicans voted through the agriculture portion as a single bill without really reforming our market-distorting and pork-tossing agricultural programs much at all, and we’re still waiting for the House version of a bill for the food stamp program.
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