Farm bill redux
The White House is calling it "farm bill two - the sequel." And according to President Bush, the second one isn’t any better than the first.
To assure that U.S. food aid abroad continues amid a global hunger crisis, Congress and Bush are again passing, vetoing and enacting a $290 billion bill for providing farm subsidies, food stamps and other nutrition programs over the next five years.
The Senate scheduled a second vote on the bill for Thursday, two weeks after the discovery that 34 pages were missing from the parchment copy that Congress sent the White House, that Bush vetoed, and that the House and Senate then enacted with two-thirds majority votes overriding the veto.
All of it became law, except for the 34 missing pages dealing with international food aid. The House voted then to pass the entire bill again, and similar action Thursday by the Senate will send it to Bush for what the White House says will be a second veto. Once that occurs, Congress plans to again override the veto and international food aid programs will join the rest of the package as law.
"As we find in the movies, generally sequels aren’t any better than the original," said White House spokesman Scott Stanzel, who confirmed that Bush will again veto the legislation "once they check to make sure it is complete this time."
Bush claims the legislation, which extends agriculture and nutrition programs, is too expensive and too generous with subsidies for farmers who are enjoying record-high prices and incomes instant payday loan guaranteed payday loans. He opposed the legislation from the start, and began threatening last July to veto it.
A bipartisan group of negotiators on the bill made small cuts to subsidies in an effort to appease the White House, but Bush said they weren’t enough. Republicans in the House and Senate determined to get bigger subsidies for farmers and more food aid to the poor before November’s election, then abandoned the president in large numbers.
A Senate vote on the redo was delayed most of this week by objections from two of the bill’s Republican opponents, Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Administration officials said Wednesday that further delay in getting the international food aid into law could delay shipments of U.S. aid to developing countries with rising rates of starvation.
"If by this time next week we don’t have a bill then we are going to start to see real problems," said Stephen Driesler, deputy assistant administrator for legislative and public affairs for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
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