Folks on Capitol Hill want to go home for the July 4 recess with a sense of accomplishment and one of the heavy lifts in front of them is the farm bill.
The Senate’s $955 billion farm bill that passed the Senate June 17 by a comfortable 66 to 27 votes and now the House moves forward on its bill, the framework of which passed the House Agriculture Committee May 16 and clocks in at $940 billion.
Well, it is called the farm bill, but really it is a guaranteed income bill for farmers and a jobs program for the thousands of bureaucrats shuffling papers for the food stamps program, which is now called in Washington the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, but everywhere else: food stamps.
The House and Senate will have to blend their two bills in conference, and then that one bill will go back to be approved by both chambers before it is sent to the president for signature.
As the House begins its work on the farm bill, the GOP leaders got a gift from President Barack Obama, when he put out the word that he would veto the bill final bill if it looked like the House bill. The president is said to be upset the House bill trims food stamp increases by $20 billion and that the bill has too little green energy pork. Tsk, tsk.
What better cover do the Republican leaders need as they ring up another trillion dollars over the next 10 years?
The big twist in both the Senate and House bills is the repackaging of farm subsidies as “crop insurance.” Speaking generally, the new insurance program pays companies to offer crop insurance and pays farmers up to 60 percent of their premiums to buy crop insurance policies.
Commodity prices and farm income are at historic highs right now and the government could get out of the subsidy business altogether and no one would notice.
The beautiful part of the new crop insurance program is that it locks in today’s high prices as the baseline, so when prices regress to the mean, farmers continue to harvest bushels of cash. It is not just guaranteed income, the program codifies the boom and leaves the bust for the taxpayers.
On the food stamp side, both the House and Senate bills leave it for the Congresses in the future to reform a program that not only drives up food costs for everyone not using food stamps, but it also subject to massive fraud and abuse.
We know the Brothers Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombers, used food stamps, because the state of Massachusetts refuses to release details of their purchases, it is impossible to determine whether they bought their pressure cookers and gun powder with their electronic benefits transfer card tied to their food stamps account.
One step towards fixing this flaw is an amendment by Keystone State GOP Rep. Thomas A. Marino, the SNAP Transparency Act. If passed the amendment would require stores and other businesses accepting the EBT cards to report what was purchased with the card.
“Even though Congress established parameters for the program and designated what foods are eligible under SNAP, Congress has virtually no information to ensure that the program is operating effectively,” the congressman said. After the data is collected, the Department of Agriculture would have to create a searchable database open to the American people, not just Congress.
Other helpful amendments would require photo ID for anyone using their EBT card, ending rural cellphone subsidies and cutting off funding for our partnership with the Mexican government to promote illegal aliens to sign up for food stamps.
Sound sensible to you? Don’t count on them seeing the light of day. The Republican leaders are committed to getting this farm bill passed quickly.
One Republican congressman in leadership position told a group of Washington conservatives that as bad as the farm bill is, it is better than the 2008 farm bill, so it is better to pass it and get it over with.
To folks outside of Washington, it must seem strange that the GOP leadership works so hard to make life so easy for Democrats. But, this is the way the city works.
Besides, the Republican leaders need to pass the farm bill, so they can move to the next item on their agenda: Giving the Democrats their immigration bill.
Neil W. McCabe is the editor of Human Event’s “Guns & Patriots” e-letter and was a senior reporter at the Human Events newspaper. McCabe deployed with the Army Reserve to Iraq for 15 months as a combat historian. For many years, he was a reporter and photographer for “The Pilot,” Boston’s Catholic paper. He was also the editor of two free community papers, “The Somerville (Mass.) News and “The Alewife (North Cambridge, Mass.).”
