House Fails On Farm Bill

House Fails on Farm Bill. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

We have been waiting a long time to hear news from the House on the Farm Bill. Thursday morning though, things began to heat up. Congressman Doc Hastings from Washington State says that the farm portions of the bill all passed and explains what the hold up was.

HASTINGS: As you know the farm bill was on the floor and it failed on the floor. We always knew that the farm bill was misnamed because 80% of it was non-farm. It’s actually a nutrition program. What happened was at the last minute there were a number of Democrats that because there was an amendment that was adopted at the end of the debate that would have put in place a pilot program to further look at the efficiencies of the food stamp program. That amendment passed. It passed with my support. But apparently because of the discrepancy here in the votes it appears to me that a number of Democrats voted no because of frankly a provision that should be in place to save taxpayers dollars in the long run.

Hastings says that it was the nutrition portion of the bill that was the sticking point. What’s next?

HASTINGS: There’s several things you could do. You could move to reconsider. There’re a number of, like I say, Republican votes that you could probably persuade to reconsider the vote. Or under our rules you could simply introduce another farm bill that’s essentially the same as this and bring it back to the floor.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.