Trash talking the farm bill and lining up votes

House Agriculture chairman Glenn Thompson, who frequently injects red-meat messaging into his public comments, says he expects the Senate to pick up the pace in writing a farm bill. He has set a date, May 23, for a committee vote on his package, though there is no Senate mark-up session in sight.

“We must get serious in writing a farm bill,” said Thompson in the congressional version of trash-talking an opponent. Senate Agriculture chairwoman Debbie Stabenow delivered her put-down of House efforts a few days earlier. “We have a bill. They have a framework so far,” she said over coffee with reporters. Like Thompson, she said it was time to get serious.

The committee leaders chose the same day to release their packages last week; Thompson in a five-page “overview” and Stabenow in a 94-page section-by-section summary. This week, they are trying to line up votes for their differing versions of the new farm bill.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Stabenow were scheduled to meet Democratic members of the House Agriculture Committee on Thursday morning to discuss strategy. “This is not the first Jeffries-Stabenow-House Dems meeting,” said a House Democratic staff worker. A social media account controlled by Republicans on the Agriculture Committee, said Stabenow, a former committee member, “was meddling in the affairs of the House.”

Ten Democrats and five Republicans on the House Agriculture Committee face tough races for re-election. Republicans hope some of those Democrats will support all or parts of Thompson’s bill, to be released a few days before the bill-drafting session. If they do, they will declare it bipartisan legislation, rather than a Republican-written bill. Democratic leaders, believing they will prevail in the end, are seeking uniform opposition at present. Only a genuinely bipartisan bill will succeed in the House or in the Democratic-controlled Senate, they say.

Congress is seven months late in enacting a new farm bill. The “four corners” of the farm bill — Stabenow, Thompson, Georgia Rep. David Scott and Arkansas Sen. John Boozman — are at odds over three issues: SNAP cuts, climate funding, and higher spending on crop subsidies. The Thompson and Stabenow packages reflect those disagreements.

Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee, like Stabenow, have objected to Republican proposals, written into Thompson’s package, to cut SNAP spending by $28 billion over the next decade and to remove the guardrails on climate mitigation funding so the money can be used for soil and water conservation projects unrelated to global warming.

Thompson says Stabenow’s package “doesn’t… reflect the highest priorities we have heard loud and clear from American farmers.” Stabenow said her plan would assure that major row crops see at least a 5% increase in reference prices. Higher reference prices would make it easier to trigger subsidy payments. Thompson’s overview says he would “increase support” for crop subsidy programs “to account for persistent inflation and rising costs of production.”