By
ALAN GUEBERT
Journalism school doesn’t make cynics out of
people who pick up the pen for a living. Committing journalism — using the pen
to chronicle the escapades of the crooks and crackpots you encounter as a
journalist — often does, though.
A glaring example of this transformation
arrived in the late July action of Speaker of the House John Boehner. No one,
not even the most ink-covered, nicotine-stained journalist, could have foreseen
the speaker’s cynical use of the worst drought in 50 years to paper over his
colleagues’ failure to act on a needed Farm Bill.
Like the current drought, Boehner’s dilemma
grew worse over the summer. After a year of dull talk and even duller hearings,
both congressional ag committees completed their 2012 Farm Bill work by
mid-July. The full Senate, in a rare display of bipartisanship, even passed its
bill June 21.
But the House squelched any chance to get the
two versions welded together before the 2008 act expires Oct. 1. Boehner kept
the House bill back because it contained too few spending cuts for the
tea-drinking wing (nearly 90 votes) of his Republican majority.
Indeed, the committee-passed bill pared just
$35 billion from its 10-year spending plan of $969 billion and just $16.5
billion of that from what everyone still calls food stamps, now the
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
That tissue-thin slice — 1.6 percent! howled
tea party activists — from nutrition assistance stamps meant Boehner needed
Democratic votes for the House to pass the committee bill. Worse, he needed those
votes before Congress went on its five-week August recess so staffers
could “conference” the two versions to have any chance to meet the Farm Bill’s
Oct. 1 deadline.
The Dems, however, were never going to pull
Boehner’s bacon out of the tea kettle. Their party’s power is urban-based and
those representatives want more food aid, not less.
In fact, this Farm Bill’s proposed
farm-to-food-aid ratio — four out of every five Farm bill dollars go to
nutrition programs — is largely why for 50 years rural House members have
delivered Farm Bills filled with food stamps and, for 50 years, their urban
colleagues have delivered Farm Bills to farmers and ranchers.
No Farm Bill has ever or will ever move
without that rural-urban coalition to fuel it.
So Boehner, in a bind, took a page from
today’s toxic playbook and devised a doomed-to-fail scheme to extend the
current Farm Bill one year so that when it failed, and it would, he could place
the blame anywhere but on himself and his divided Republican Party members.
The device designed to do just that was a
47-page bill that didn’t just extend the 2008 law through Oct. 2013; it all but
rewrote it.
For example, explained the National
Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, Boehner’s plan not only cut “farm
conservation programs by $761 million,” it also “effectively terminate(d) … all
farm-bill funded rural economic development, renewable energy, organic
agriculture, local food and beginning and minority farmer programs…”
And, the NSAC went on, it did so with “no
open deliberations, no hearings, no testimony, and no chance for amendments.”
The Speaker, of course, could have cared
less. His job wasn’t for the House to pass his bill or any bill. His job was
make it appear that failure — and failure was in the air before he ever uttered
the words “Farm Bill” in late July — lay at the feet of Dems while giving his
party’s tea drinkers something to chew on other than him.
But the jig was up even before it got to a
vote. Almost every farm group canned the speaker’s plan from the start. The
cynicism in it was so evident and so transparent that everyone with a scoop
shovel or pitchfork in the Farm Bill fight saw through it in an instant.
So, now, several more months will pass
without the House doing the simple job of passing its Farm Bill.
Which reminds me, when’s Election Day?
Original Article Here
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