Farm Bill Deal to Hungry Americans: You're on Your Own
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/farm-bill-deal-to-hungry-americans-youre-on-your-own/277721/
Last night, House Republicans made good on their promise to split the apparently unpassable farm bill in two--the farm part, with its many and controversial subsidies to big agriculture, now in the form of crop insurance, and the nutrition part, the $80 SNAP, or food stamp, program. And just now, they passed the 608-page bill they released, 216-208.
As with pretty much everything to do with the going-on-two-year struggle to pass a new five-year farm bill, this has more to do with political theater than collaboration. Eric Cantor made a point of announcing the division during an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival a few weeks ago (which did not impress Conor Friedersdorf, who commented that the moderator, Ramesh Ponnuru, "may as well have asked, 'Could you recite conservative boilerplate in a monotone?'"
. "We'll get it passed by the end of July," he said of his split bill.
Already, some were calling the move an attempt by Cantor to highlight John Boehner's last-minute failure to muster enough votes to pass the last iteration--which came to grief over the proposed $20 billion in food-stamp cuts--and to position himself as the next, stronger, speaker of the house. That was certainly the best political explanation for a move that seemed to have nothing to do with bipartisanship or realism. And today's vote will certainly strengthen his campaign to displace Boehner, if the speculation is right.
The idea of the split makes intuitive sense. Anyone who looks at the farm bill for a few minutes--or, like Dan Imhoff, devotes a book to it, or, like Marion Nestle, an entire semester's course to it--sees what a chimera or, more to the point, a monster it is. It has next to nothing to do with the farms most people think of--the ones growing mixed crops, the ones that supply farmer's markets. It doesn't mention environmental protection or land conservation, though some of the country's most important safeguards are in it. And it doesn't mention nutrition assistance or hunger, though fully four-fifths of it are food stamps. Why not keep the agricultural parts, even if they benefit only industrial agriculture, in what's called the farm bill, and call the food-assistance portion what it is? That would get the farm bill back on the rails, and stop letting SNAP debates hijack every vote.
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A Minnesota state representative, discussing the expansion of people using food stamps, tries to illustrate her point that the program creates dependency by quoting an “ironic” story a “friend” sent her.
As Bluestem Praire reports, Minnesota Republican Representative Mary Franson said, “Last week, we worked on some welfare reform bills. And here, it’s kind of ironic, I’ll read you this little funny clipped that we got from a friend. It says, ‘Isn’t it ironic that the food stamp program, part of the Department of Agriculture, is pleased to be distributing the greatest amount of food stamps ever. Meanwhile, the Park Service, also part of the Department of Agriculture, asks us to please not feed the animals, because the animals may grow dependent and not learn to take care of themselves.”
The poor and being pilloried at every turn
