Food stamps out, farm bill passes House

WASHINGTON - House Republicans passed a five-year U.S. farm-policy bill that retains subsidies to farmers and strips out food stamp spending, costing it Democratic support.

The plan was approved Thursday 216-208, with all Democrats and 12 Republicans in opposition. Arkansas’ four Republican representatives - Rick Crawford, Tim Griffin, Steve Womack and Tom Cotton - voted for the bill.

It was the first time that food stamps had not been a part of the farm bill since 1973. The measure also would repeal underlying provisions that potentially would double milk prices if a new law isn’t passed.

Thursday’s debate in the House was particularly abrasive. Democrats repeatedly called for roll-call votes on parliamentary procedures and motions to adjourn, delaying the final vote by hours and accusing Republicans over and over again of callousness and cruelty.

Republicans shouted protests, tried to silence the most strident Democrats and were repeatedly forced to vote to uphold their own parliamentary rulings.

Rep. Frank D. Lucas,R-Okla., the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said he would try to draft a separate food-stamp bill “as soon as I can achieve a consensus.”

The measure passed Thursday, scaled back after the House defeated a bill that included food stamps three weeks ago, is “extremely flawed,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee.

“The bill passed by the House today is not a real farm bill and is an insult to rural America,” the Michigan Democrat, who will lead Senate negotiators to work out a final bill with House lawmakers, said in a statement after the vote.

The legislation, which benefits crop buyers such as Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. and insurers including Wells Fargo & Co., has been working through Congress for almost two years. The Senate on June 10 passed a plan that would cost $955 billion over a decade. The current law begins to expire Sept. 30.

President Barack Obama has threatened to veto a farm measure that excludes food stamp and nutrition programs.

House action has been stymied largely by disagreements on food stamps. The legislation rejected last month would cut spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, responsible for 80 percent of the bill’s costs, by about 2.5 percent, or about $2 billion a year.

Democrats who balked at the reductions joined Republicans objecting to the plan’s cost to scuttle the bill. Republican leaders revived the measure in scaled-back form.

The stripped-down plan gained support from Republicans willing to deal with food stamps later.

“It’s not a secret I am not a fan of the farm bill,” said Rep. Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican who opposed the June version and supported the bill Thursday. “I’ve learned around here that you rarely get to vote for success but you can vote for progress.”

Republicans working to round up votes said the revised version was written to avoid the expiration of farm programs in the future. The plan would repeal language that lets federal policy revert to provisions established in 1938 and 1949, when the nation and its farm economy were different.

The threat of allowing those old laws to resume has helped prod Congress to modernize farm-subsidy and farm-loan programs, since the laws set terms that could double the wholesale price of milk starting next year. The House plan would do away with that leverage, said Rep. Michael Conaway, R-Texas.

Beyond that, the bill is basically the same as the previous farm-policy measure.

The bill would save about $20 billion by consolidating or cutting numerous farm-subsidy programs, including $5 billion paid annually to farmers and landowners whether they plant crops or not. The money saved from eliminating those payments would be directed into the $9 billion crop insurance program, and new subsidies would be created for peanut, cotton and rice farmers.

The bill adds money to support fruit and vegetable growers, and it restores insurance programs for livestock producers, which expired in 2011, leaving thousands of operations without disaster coverage during last year’s drought. The bill also eliminates a dairy program that controls the supply of milk produced and sold in the United States.

Farm-policy legislation without food stamps has been opposed by groups including the American Farm Bureau Federation, the largest U.S. farmer organization.

“The ‘marriage’ between the nutrition and farm communities and our constituents in developing and adopting comprehensive farm legislation has been an effective, balanced arrangement for decades that has worked to ensure all Americans and the nation benefits,” Bob Stallman, president of the Washington-based group, wrote Thursday in a letter to House members.

Farm groups and anti-hunger groups have warned that separating the farm and nutrition programs after linking them since the 1970s would be misguided. Rural lawmakers have long added money for food stamps to the farm bill, which sets policy for agricultural subsidies and other farm programs, to gather urban votes for the measure.

Last week, more than 530 groups signed a letter of opposition to the plan, while other organizations, including the Texas Farm Bureau and the National Pork Producers Council, supported it. While sidestepping food stamps for the moment, some small-government advocacy groups that have called for an overhaul in the program said they don’t like the possibility that a later House- Senate conference committee could go its own way.

“We highly suspect that this whole process is a ‘rope-a- dope’ exercise” of “splitting up the farm bill only as a means to get to conference with the Senate where a bicameral back-room deal will reassemble the commodity and food stamp titles, leaving us back where we started,” one of those groups, the Club for Growth, said in a statement.

Still, simple approval of a plan that has struggled to get anywhere in the House was seen as a victory by some lawmakers.

“Thank God we can do something,” said Tom Rooney, R-Fla., said as he walked off the House floor.

Information for this article was contributed by Alan Bjerga, Derek Wallbank, James Rowley and Roxana Tiron of Bloomberg News; by Ron Nixon and Jonathan Weisman of The New York Times; and by Mary Clare Jalonick and Erica Werner of The Associated Press.