[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 185 (Wednesday, December 5, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S14774-S14777]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               FARM, NUTRITION, AND BIOENERGY ACT OF 2007

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the pending business.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

       A bill (H.R. 2419) to provide for the continuation of 
     agricultural programs through fiscal year 2012, and for other 
     purposes.

  Pending:

       Harkin amendment No. 3500, in the nature of a substitute.
       Reid (for Dorgan/Grassley) amendment No. 3508 (to amendment 
     No. 3500), to strengthen payment limitations and direct the 
     savings to increased funding for certain programs.
       Reid amendment No. 3509 (to amendment No. 3508), to change 
     the enactment date.
       Reid amendment No. 3510 (to the language proposed to be 
     stricken by amendment No. 3500), to change the enactment 
     date.
       Reid amendment No. 3511 (to amendment No. 3510), to change 
     the enactment date.
       Motion to commit the bill to the Committee on Agriculture, 
     Nutrition, and Forestry, with instructions to report back 
     forthwith, with Reid amendment No. 3512.
       Reid amendment No. 3512 (to the instructions of the motion 
     to commit to the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and 
     Forestry, with instructions), to change the enactment date.
       Reid amendment No. 3513 (to the instructions of the motion 
     to recommit), to change the enactment date.
       Reid amendment No. 3514 (to amendment No. 3513), to change 
     the enactment date.


                             Cloture Motion

  Mr. REID. Madam President, it is my understanding there is a cloture 
motion on the Harkin substitute amendment at the desk.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The motion having been filed pursuant to rule 
XXII, the clerk will report the motion.
  The assistant legislative clerk read as follows:

                             Cloture Motion

       We, the undersigned Senators, in accordance with the 
     provisions of rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate, 
     do hereby move to bring to a close debate on the Harkin 
     substitute amendment No. 3500 to H.R. 2419, the farm bill.
         Tom Harkin, Russell D. Feingold, Jon Tester, Dick Durbin, 
           Benjamin L. Cardin, Frank R. Lautenberg, John F. Kerry, 
           Ted Kennedy, Byron L. Dorgan, Barack Obama, Ben Nelson, 
           Amy Klobuchar, Sherrod Brown, Sheldon Whitehouse, Tim 
           Johnson, Jim Webb, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I now ask unanimous consent that the 
mandatory quorum call be waived.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Pryor). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I move to proceed to calendar No. 487, H.R. 
3996--I am happy to see my friend, the distinguished Senator from 
Georgia on the floor. I believe my friend from Georgia knows how hard I 
have tried to get some way to proceed forward on this farm bill. We 
don't have farms in Nevada. We do have some. We have lots of ranches. 
As I have said on the floor before, the one crop we are very proud of 
is onions. We are the largest white onion producer in the world--in the 
United States--I am sorry. And in Lyon County, we produce lots of 
stuff: onions, garlic, and in Mason Valley, lots and lots of alfalfa. 
The greenbelts of Nevada are shrinking because of the population growth 
we have. But we still have ranches--ranches that were owned by Bing 
Crosby--I mean that were famous ranches. They still are. But even they 
are being hit by the population growth.
  We are very proud of our ranching community. There are things in this 
farm bill that have direct impact on my constituency in the State of 
Nevada. That is one reason I have tried everything I know to move to 
this bill.
  We have tried moving forward amendment by amendment. The Dorgan 
amendment under the bill is still pending. That is a bipartisan 
amendment. I have suggested let's have X number of amendments, and 
finally I got so desperate I said let's have the Republicans have 10 
amendments and we will have 5. Still no takers on that. We heard from 
Senator Harkin today who said: Senator Chambliss and I now have 
the amendments down to less than 40. I said: Oh, good. Let's enter into 
an agreement that we will have 40 amendments, or whatever it is, and we 
will proceed to work on those. No time agreements. No deal.

  The only agreement we have had on this bill is we have locked in a 
finite number of amendments. But it is 287 amendments--287 amendments--
with issues that are so pertinent to the farm bill, like immigrants' 
driver's licenses, just for beginners. There have been some 
suggestions: Well, why don't you just move to the bill. We are in the 
waning days of this year, and we have to proceed and complete a number 
of issues. But I was a little bit lax. I said: Well, maybe we are 
working here, trying to work together on things, and the Amtrak bill 
hasn't been done for 5 or 6 years and people are crying for something 
to be done about this. We have one Republican Senator for years who has 
tried to kill Amtrak. He came very close to it a few times and we 
always were able to survive. So this year, I said let's move to it. On 
a bipartisan basis we had people who wanted to do that bill. We opened 
it up. What is the first amendment? A tax measure. A tax measure. We 
finally got that bill passed. But we can't on this farm bill open it 
up.
  I have heard the distinguished Republican leader come forward and 
say: Well, that is what we have done in the past. I have been through 
this before, but let me repeat for everyone: The average number of 
nongermane amendments on farm bills has been one--one per bill--one. In 
my efforts to be fair and to move forward, I said, OK, on the 10 
amendments the Republicans want to do on this bill, we will have two of 
them nongermane. I didn't ask what they would be. There was no taking 
of that. So I have done literally everything I can do.
  The farming and ranching community of this country, they know why we 
are not moving forward on the farm bill. They know what is going on: 
The Republicans do not want to move on the farm bill. Maybe they don't 
care about it. Maybe they think it would be some kind of a victory for 
Democrats who are in the majority in the Senate--not much of a 
majority, but we are in the majority. I don't understand what this is 
all about. But Friday morning we are going to have a cloture vote 
again. Is that so unreasonable that if people believe in the farm bill, 
then they would still have 30 hours to offer amendments relating to the 
farm bill? They would have to be germane amendments. But what would be 
wrong with that?
  We have had one cloture motion. It has been defeated. We have waited 
weeks now. We have offered all kinds of suggestions to move forward. We 
have not heard a single proposal back from the Republicans other than 
to say: Well, open it up for amendments. Open it up for amendments so 
we can ask that we initiate a flat tax, or open it up to an amendment 
that we push forward on Bush's tax cuts that have put this country into 
such a terrible hole financially. That is what the plan is, and we are 
not going to be a part of that plan. We want to do a farm bill. We want 
to do it fairly and reasonably.
  While we are talking about schedule, I have spoken to the Speaker 
several times today and she is going to complete either today or 
tomorrow an energy bill. That being the case, that will come here as a 
message from the House and we will have a cloture vote on that. The way 
things now are, if it gets here tomorrow, we will file a cloture motion 
on that and we will have a vote on that Saturday. So everyone should 
know that unless there is an agreement to change that, we will have a 
vote on Saturday. We have Senators leaving for Bali and Senators 
wanting to go to some celebration at Pearl Harbor, and a lot of other 
places people want to go. But the country has a lot of business that 
needs to be attempted to be completed, and we are going to do that. I 
hope we can work together to solve some of these issues.
  But to show the futility of our trying to progress, take, for 
example, the AMT, this tax proposal which was passed by a former 
Republican administration. Unless we place a so-called

[[Page S14775]]

patch on it, 20 million people or so will have an added tax. Some who 
make as much as $75,000 to $500,000 will be affected by this 
legislation if we don't do something to patch it. I have done 
everything I can except turn a back flip off of the Presiding Officer's 
chair to see if we can figure out a way to move forward on AMT. I ask: 
How could we be more reasonable than what we have suggested?
  The House has passed a bill. It is over here. I said: Let's vote on 
that by unanimous consent. Let's vote on it. In addition to voting on 
that, let's vote on Senator Lott's proposal. Senator Lott's proposal is 
to do away with the AMT. The only problem with that is it would cost 
about $1 trillion, but we are willing to vote on it. Senator Grassley 
and Senator Baucus have a measure out of the Finance Committee that 
says we are going to have tax incentives, which people believe in, and 
they are all paid for. With that is an AMT that is not paid for. Nope, 
we can't do that. I said: Well, I have a new idea. Let's have a vote 
and not pay for it. Nope, can't do that. So if there were ever a book 
on being reasonable, I hope they include a paragraph or two about what 
we have tried to do the last few days. We have tried to be reasonable.

  Think about this: What else could we agree to do on AMT? They don't 
want to vote on it if it is paid for. They don't want a vote if it is 
half paid for, they don't want a vote if it is repealed, and they don't 
want a vote if it is not paid for. I don't know what other iterations 
of this anyone could come up with, but I think I have covered the 
basics. We have been told by the Republicans no vote on any of them.
  If there is a closure of this congressional session and the AMT 
hasn't passed, it can be directed where most everything is directed--
with the Republicans marching in lockstep with the White House. The 
Republicans. If there is no AMT patch, it is the fault of the 
Republicans. They won't let us vote on anything.
  So I say through the Chair to the distinguished Senator and my friend 
from Georgia: Do you know how we can complete the farm bill?
  Mr. CHAMBLISS. Mr. President, first, I thank the majority leader for 
coming down to the floor and providing one more chance to discuss this. 
I regret that the majority leader has taken this action to file 
cloture. But I can tell you what the answer is and I can tell you how 
to complete the farm bill. This is our fifth week on this bill, 
literally. We had 2 weeks before the Thanksgiving recess. We have been 
out 2 weeks, and our staff has been working extremely hard during those 
2 weeks, and here we are back in the fifth week. If we had had an open 
process initially, this farm bill would be in conference today. I think 
that still can happen. The distinguished majority leader referred to 
the number of amendments that are out there. I don't remember what the 
number was, but 286, I believe, is what he said, and I think that is 
correct. A little over half of those were Democratic amendments and 
about half were Republican amendments. We have hotlined our bill once 
again today, and through work of the staff on both sides, we have cut 
our number in half again today, and I daresay I can cut it by two-
thirds in very short order. So we are moving south. We are moving in 
the direction of getting amendments not only that are germane, but as 
the distinguished majority leader said, we have always had a couple of 
nongermane amendments on farm bills. As I looked at the list of the 
Democratic amendments, there were a number--I daresay more nongermane 
amendments on there than there were amendments that are germane to the 
farm bill. So I don't think it serves any purpose for us to argue about 
the germaneness or nongermaneness, obviously, with the exception of the 
cloture vote, what effect it will have on that.
  But here is my point. This has been a bipartisan effort, as the 
majority leader knows. I worked very closely with Senator Harkin and 
Senator Conrad and we have developed not only a bipartisan farm bill, 
but we, in a bipartisan way, have been whittling down the amendments. 
We are going to continue to do that, in spite of the cloture motion 
being filed, and I am very hopeful that whether it is Friday of this 
week or Monday of next week or Tuesday of next week, whatever the date 
may be, we can come back to the majority leader as well as the minority 
leader and say: OK, here is where we are. This is the final number of 
amendments that we can finally have votes on, and if no agreement can 
be negotiated on that basis, then perhaps we can't come to some 
conclusion of it. But we have stood ready from day 1 to have an open 
process of amendments being filed, amendments being debated, and votes 
on those amendments, and some of those amendments I have significant 
disagreements with. But I was willing to debate those amendments and if 
we win, we win; if we don't win, we don't win, and we move on, but we 
get a bill off the floor of the Senate. The House passed their bill in 
July, and here we are in December and our work has not been completed.
  I would simply say to the majority leader, if he asks me, as he did, 
how can we get a farm bill? Let's start it. Call it up. Let's let 
amendments be filed, debated, and voted on. I assure you we will move 
this farm bill. I am here Saturday, Sunday, nights, holidays, whatever 
the majority leader suggests.
  We are here to do a farm bill, and I think I also speak for Senator 
Harkin that he will be here, and we will get this done.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, Senator Harkin told me today Senator 
Chambliss and he had agreed to about 40 amendments; is that valid?
  Mr. CHAMBLISS. We have not agreed to that. We have been working 
together.
  Mr. REID. See, Mr. President, this is the problem we have all the 
time. The Chairman, Senator Harkin, said Senator Chambliss and he had 
agreed to have less than 40 amendments. I said, fine. But it is always 
this rope-a-dope--no, it is not 40; we are still working on it. Of the 
287, half of those are gone. And I guess half of that would be 143. We 
are down on the Republican side. Maybe they can get rid of two-thirds 
of them.
  There is always some reason we cannot go to the bill. It is very easy 
to say if we had had an open process, we could have been to conference. 
That is foolishness. I repeat, we know what farm bills are. It takes a 
while to work through them. But in recent history, we have averaged one 
nonrelevant amendment per farm bill. I am willing to take nonrelevant 
amendments, but no one will tell us what they will agree to. I agreed 
to 10, 5, and then Senator Harkin said we can have 40. I said sign them 
up, let's do 40.
  The ranking member of the committee says: Well, we are still working 
on it. That is what we have had. I want all ranching and farming 
families to hear what is going on here, which has gone on for weeks. 
Whether the purpose is to stop Democrats from passing a farm bill, I 
don't know. Maybe the ranking member simply doesn't want a bill. There 
may be reasons for that. We had a bipartisan bill. Twenty percent of 
the Senate voted on the bill. Twenty-one Members of the Senate are 
members of the Agriculture Committee, and they voted to report the bill 
out here. But there has been no movement on it. Cloture is ripening 
now, and we will move forward.
  To show what is going on, we have filed cloture on AMT, the bill that 
came from the House. We filed cloture on the farm bill; we are going to 
file cloture tomorrow on the Energy bill. Everything we do, we have to 
procedurally go through all of these hoops because the Republicans are 
on steroids as it relates to filibusters. They are going to break all 
records. They will break a 2-year record this year. I think the 
American people are seeing what is going on.
  The Republicans are demanding the status quo, in spite of our 
accomplishments. We have had a lot of accomplishments, Mr. President. 
We can run through the list, but we need not do that. But there have 
been large, significant, and important accomplishments. Accomplishments 
are not enough. We believe in changing the status quo. We believe in 
the agents of change. They are agents of keeping things the way they 
are.
  The American people want things changed, and we want to be part of 
that change. We hope we will be joined by our Republican colleagues to 
change a few things. Let's have a new farm bill. Let's not have to 
extend the farm bill

[[Page S14776]]

that is now in existence. Let's try to do something with AMT, rather 
than walk out of here and have people saying it is too bad the 
Democrats didn't do AMT.
  I have said that I defy anybody to come up with a way to do AMT other 
than the way I have suggested: Vote on the House bill, which is fully 
paid for; do the Lott proposal, which eliminates it and costs a 
trillion dollars; do what Senators Grassley and Baucus reported, that 
we pay for the extenders, not for the AMT. This morning I suggested 
don't pay for it. But, no. Silence.
  I am disappointed but not surprised at how we have been treated 
today.
  Mr. CHAMBLISS. Mr. President, let me respond to the distinguished 
majority leader by saying that when he says I don't want a farm bill, 
nothing could be further from the truth. I already voted for this farm 
bill. I am ready to vote for this farm bill that came out of the 
Agriculture Committee tonight.
  But when he says also that they are the advocates of change, what he 
is proposing is a change in the process when it comes to farm bills. We 
do think the status quo on farm bills is the direction we ought to go, 
which is a free and open amendment process, to let the will of the 
Senate operate relative to farm policy.
  This is a critical 5-year bill for every farmer and rancher in 
America. If we limit the ability of folks to certain areas of concern, 
then we are not giving every farmer and rancher in America the 
opportunity to have their case made in the Senate. So I simply say I am 
ready to bring a farm bill to the floor. I have been ready for 5 weeks 
to do it. Senator Harkin and I have not even had a discussion today 
about 40 amendments. I am not sure where that came from. There has been 
absolutely no conversation between Senator Harkin and myself about 
that.
  I am prepared to move forward. If the majority leader will call up 
the farm bill, let's start the amendment process, debate, and votes. I 
am here to do it.
  Thank you.
  Mr. REID. Mr. President, I appreciate the Senator from Georgia 
talking about his experience here. But I have a little bit of 
experience, too. I have been here a quarter century. I know how farm 
bills work. Anybody can look at the record. Farm bills have been 
handled the way I have talked about them being handled.
  If the Senator from Georgia so likes this bill that he voted for, 
what would be wrong with voting cloture with us and allowing people who 
have germane amendments to the farm bill to offer them? What in the 
world is wrong with that? I say, respectfully, that the Senator is 
speaking out of both sides of his mouth when he is saying he supports 
this bill, when he is not willing to vote for cloture and accept 
germane amendments. He wants some other process so they can deal with 
driver's licenses for illegal immigrants and other issues that have 
nothing to do with the farm bill. They are trying to send a message. I 
have said we will accept x number of amendments, and I spoke to Senator 
Harkin and he said they worked on this today. I thought he had spoken 
to the Senator from Georgia. Maybe it was staff driven, but he said 
they agreed to 40 amendments. I said sign the deal up. Or let's agree 
to 50 amendments. But we cannot get any agreement. We are in a rope-a-
dope, Mr. President.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Republican leader is recognized.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, this sounds somewhat similar to the 
discussion the majority leader and I had earlier today, so I will not 
belabor this. Sometimes it is harder to get a consent agreement 
limiting Members' opportunities to offer amendments than it is to call 
up a bill and process amendments, which is the way we have done farm 
bills in the past.

  Six years ago, a Democratic majority filed cloture a couple times and 
cloture was not invoked. The bill was put aside, and we came back later 
and finished it in a week, with no consent agreements, no limitations, 
nothing. We disposed of the amendments. That is the way to pass this 
bill.
  With regard to the AMT, this is a bill upon which there is a 
possibility of a consent agreement limiting amendments. In fact, I 
offered one yesterday that would limit the AMT consideration to four 
amendments. So we can get, on the AMT, a consent agreement that would 
make that possible to be dealt with in short order.
  I repeat my request of the majority leader to take a look at that and 
see if we cannot enter into a consent agreement to wrap up the AMT.
  Regarding floor time, we have spent the whole day doing nothing. 
Today, we could have been on the farm bill processing amendments and 
moving us down that path. Senator Chambliss indicated, before I came to 
the floor, that the list on our side could be significantly narrowed. 
Why don't we, at some point, look at that, and we will have fewer and 
fewer amendments to deal with. I don't know what we intend to do on the 
floor next week, but if most of the work of the Senate right now is 
going on in negotiations off the floor, why not be doing the farm bill 
on the floor and processing amendments and moving forward like the 
Senate normally does?
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois is recognized.
  Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, it is interesting that when you offer to 
the Republicans the opportunity to have a farm bill and debate the 
issues on the bill, they reject it. They want to debate a lot of other 
things. They want to bring up a lot of other issues. I recall the list 
of amendments, including one from the Senator from Alaska regarding the 
Exxon Valdez litigation. That is an important issue, but is it a farm 
bill issue? Would the Senator from Georgia argue with me that that has 
no place on the farm bill? Why would that be on the list? I am sure it 
is a valid idea.
  When it comes to AMT, 19 million Americans are going to get hit with 
this tax if we don't do something. The Senator from Kentucky says we 
should engage in a debate on the Senate floor on the flat tax. What? 
Yes, the flat tax. That is one of their amendments. They want to toss 
out the entire Internal Revenue Code and replace it with a flat tax. We 
have to argue that before we take up the AMT. That is what we are 
hearing from the Republicans.
  Does that sound like it is responsible, like it addresses the issues 
we were sent to deal with? Every time we get to a substantive issue, 
Senator Reid comes to the floor and says let's narrow the amendments, 
have the debate, and decide it up or down. We will give you your chance 
to offer amendments related to the bill, and we will see how it ends. 
How much fairer can that be? They reject it.
  Time and again, they reject it because they don't want us to achieve 
anything in this session. Fifty-six times this year they have created a 
filibuster situation. Now, people who don't follow the Senate may not 
know what that means, but if you saw ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'' 
and watched Jimmy Stewart crumple at his desk when he had run out of 
steam and could not talk anymore, that is what a filibuster is all 
about. That is what the Republicans are all about--talk, talk, talk--or 
in the modern era, recess, quorum call, recess, quorum call.
  Some Senator said to me it reminds him of when Abraham Lincoln 
contacted a general during the Civil War and said: If you are not going 
to use the Army, can you let me use it to execute the war?
  If we are not going to use the Senate floor to do the business of the 
American people, can we set up a flea market or something, so that 
something positive is happening?
  The Republicans are determined to stop anything substantive from 
happening. We want to take up the AMT tax and protect 19 million 
taxpayers. They are going to stop us. When they stop us, they are going 
to blame us. We saw that earlier in the day. The Republican leadership 
stopped a bill, and a Senator said we are just not taking up 
appropriations bills. They cannot have it both ways.
  I listened to Senator Reid, and I detected a note of frustration. How 
many weeks have we wasted trying to get through a farm bill that passed 
overwhelmingly on a bipartisan basis? They want to consider an 
amendment on the Exxon Valdez spill on the farm bill. I am sorry, but 
there are important things in that bill that need to pass, and they 
should not be held hostage to the whim of every Senator on the 
Republican side who has an idea. I am sure we could have a spirited 
debate about the future of the flat tax. But it is getting close to 
Christmas, and we

[[Page S14777]]

are supposed to get this done before we leave. We will never get it 
done if every Senator on the Republican side who dreams up another 
debate topic is given another half day or 2 days to pursue it.
  At some point, leadership involves responsibility. At this point, I 
think the Republicans are being irresponsible because they refuse to 
let us do the people's business. They want to protect the status quo. 
They don't want this to change. They want to make this a do-nothing 
Congress just like the last Congress, when they were in charge. We are 
trying our best to avoid that. The honest answer may be that we need 
more votes on this side of the aisle so we can stop this, so we can 
move ahead and make some real changes in farm policy and tax policy. We 
would not reach that point if the Republican strategy continues--
filibusters and blocking, coming up with excuses, and spending months 
on a bill that should have taken days.
  That is their plan, their policy. That is what they believe in. That 
is the best they can offer the American people. That is why the 
Republican Party leadership in the Congress has been summarily rejected 
by the American people. They are sick of it. They want bipartisan 
cooperation, progress, and they want change.

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