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House Passes Farm Bill, but at what Cost?

It was one of the most unpretty House floor Farm Bill debates I can remember, starting with Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R, VA) trying to stop floor consideration and ending with Goodlatte trying to toss the bill back to the Ag Committee. Ultimately, the House passed the bill on a 231-191 vote, but the question must be asked: What will it cost the Democrats in the long run?

The issue is, as it’s been from the beginning, the cost of the package and how to pay for it. What chafed Goodlatte and a number of other GOP Ag Committee membgers was, as Rep. Jim McCrery (R, LA), ranking member of the House Ways & Means Committee, called it, a “ham-handed” move by House Democrat leaders to pay for beefed up food stamps (a priority of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, CA))and energy programs by slapping a tax on the U.S. subsidiaries of foreign-owned companies and removing from energy companies exemptions they’ve enjoyed on royalty payments on leases to drill on federal lands.

What Goodlatte, et al, railed against was that not only did the Democrat leaders create an entirely new title for the bill after the committee had formally reported it, they did so without hearings or consultation with the GOP. Adding insult to injury was the fact that that throughout the mark-up process, the GOP was assured over and over there would be no tax increases to pay for farm programs. The Democrats simply defined the financing scheme as “closing a tax loophole,” adding the appropriate flag-waving “fairness” rhetoric on the floor.

Goodlatte also decried the loss of bipartisanship that has long been the hallmark of House Ag Commmittee legislation, and warned that the financing package would doom the House Farm Bill, violated treaty commitments and possibly subject companies to retaliation overseas. Ag committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (R, CO) said she’d been told “untruths,” and another member said he’d been “duped.”

Standing back and looking at the broad picture, it’s pretty apparent this was a budget gimmick to get the bill through final passage on the floor. Stuck within the “pay-go” restrictions, Peterson admitted during his rebuttal to Goodlatte’s move to send the bill back to committee that if the bill went back it would die because there were no offsets to pay for the new programs. Some contend there will be “magic beans,” program offsets that will mystically appear between now and when the bill moves to conference that will remove the stigma from the bill.

A new scheme better be forthcoming because Sen. Charles Grassley (R, IA), member of the Senate Agriculture Committee and ranking member of the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, has already signaled the Senate won’t accept the House tax maneuver. You pay for new farm programs by cutting old farm programs, he said, not by fiddling with the federal tax code.

This move by House leadership is also symptomatic of another problem that threatens to become a Pelosi trademark, and that is her seeming obsession with hitting arbitrary deadlines on various legislation, the quality of the the legislation at risk of taking a back seat to the time line. She said she wanted a Farm Bill done by the end of July and dad-gum it, she got one.

But at what cost? What harm would have been done to pend the bill into next week? Heck, the Senate doesn’t even plan to start marking up its bill until September. And when it comes to offsets, why doesn’t she figuratively lock Peterson, Goodlatte, et al in a small dark room and tell them they aren’t coming out until they’ve found the means by which to either pay for the new and expanded programs, or make the tough decisions as to which will live on and which will die a quiet death?

By pushing the arbitrary deadline, by apparently embracing a scheme to pay for new programs simply because the scheme’s price tag matched the needed dollars in the bill, House Democrats tread heavily on the tradition of bipartisanship enjoyed by the House Ag Committee. It should be remembered: Trust in one’s colleagues, even if separated by a political and ideological divide, is not something that should be trifled with.