[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 66 (Thursday, April 24, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3340-S3342]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




 TEMPORARY EXTENSION OF THE FARM SECURITY AND RURAL INVESTMENT ACT OF 
                                  2002

  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate 
proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 2903 introduced earlier 
today by myself.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will report the bill by 
title.
  The legislative clerk read as follows:

       A bill (S. 2903) to amend Public Law 110-196 to provide for 
     a temporary extension of programs authorized by the Farm 
     Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 beyond April 25, 
     2008.

  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to modify the bill 
at the desk to insert the date May 9, 2008, in both paragraph 1 and 
paragraph 2, in lieu of May 2.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there objection to the 
modification?
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, reserving the right to object.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, I am inclined to object. This is no 
reflection at all on the chairman of the Agriculture Committee and the 
ranking member. We are now 6 months into working on a new farm bill. In 
2 weeks, we will probably start grain harvest in the panhandle of 
Texas. Last week, I came to the floor in a sense of frustration and 
urgency for American agriculture, for the Congress to complete its 
work. I am told by the chairman and the ranking member that a great 
deal has been accomplished this week and a sense of urgency is 
beginning to build. I would be willing to extend current farm policy 
for another week while the principals work on the finalization of a new 
farm bill because their work product is a good one. I am not here to 
destroy it. I am here to say, on behalf of American agriculture, they 
are sensing urgency--it is time Congress senses urgency. Six months 
negotiating a bill in most people's minds is about long enough.
  So for a full 2-week extension, I will object. I object.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Objection is heard.
  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I say to my colleague from Idaho that in 
1996 when that farm bill came up, it was 6 months late. It was signed 
into law April 4, 6 months past due. I do not recall the Senator from 
Idaho raising any objections. He was here at that time. And that was an 
easy farm bill. This is a very tough one. It is tough because there are 
tax measures that have come into it--not of my doing, not of the doing 
of my ranking member. But the Finance Committee and others got involved 
in this, so we have tax measures that have been a long, drawn-out 
process. This has sort of been out of our jurisdiction.
  Senator Chambliss and I have been dogged in getting the work done on 
the Agriculture bill, and we have. I say to my friend from Idaho, if 
this were only the Agriculture bill, we would have had this done a long 
time ago. This has to do with tax measures. As such, neither Senator 
Chambliss nor I have control of that; we are not chairman or ranking 
member of the Finance Committee or Ways and Means.
  I say to my friend from Idaho, so they were 6 months overdue in 1996. 
So we are over 6 months overdue right now. We are very close to getting 
this agreement done. We worked today, worked yesterday, and things are 
coming together. We made real progress. It has been slow, but it has 
been real. We have reached a number of agreements, and we are very 
close to putting this together.
  Why would we want a 2-week extension? The House is not even in 
tomorrow, for one thing. Then we have to finish this. We have to go 
back into full conference. There are some items that are going to 
require a little bit of debate and some votes. Even if we were to 
finish this bill by next Wednesday, which I think is possible, it is 
going to take another week just to do the paperwork and get everything 
together. It is humanly impossible--humanly impossible--legislatively 
impossible to get everything done in 1 week. That is why I asked for 2 
weeks, because that is realistic. It is unrealistic, at this point in 
time, on Thursday, to say we can get everything done by next Thursday. 
It is just impossible. I want to be realistic.
  I do not want to play any games around here. Frankly, we could finish 
our work, we can get the stuff done, but we can't get it all nailed 
down, the paperwork done, all that stuff that has to be done to clean 
up everything to get it to this body and get it to the House for a vote 
by next week--legislatively impossible.
  I say to my friend from Idaho, you can either be realistic or 
unrealistic, you can help us out and be supportive of a process that 
has taken a lot of time and effort by both Senator Chambliss and me, by 
Republicans and Democrats. We have been working very hard on this, and 
we are very close to getting it done. To put on just a 1-week extension 
is just unrealistic.
  Mr. CRAIG. Will the Chairman yield?
  Mr. HARKIN. I yield to my friend from Idaho.
  Mr. CRAIG. In everything I say, it is not a reflection on the work of 
the Senate, it is a reflection of reality, and 1996 doesn't have 
anything to do with it. This is 2008, and agriculture today is 
considerably different than it was in 1996.
  Today on the news you are actually hearing some supermarkets talk 
about the shortage of a food supply. I don't know if we have ever 
talked food supply shortages--ever in my lifetime--for American 
consumers.
  If what the Chairman tells me is accurate, and I have no reason to 
doubt him--and Senator Chambliss has done a wonderful job of keeping me 
and our colleagues informed--but collectively you have told this Senate 
more in the last 10 minutes than we have heard in a month from the 
collective principals on where we are with the progress. If by next 
week you have completed your work and we are simply ready to ink it and 
get it into a final package--I told Senator Chambliss I wouldn't be on 
the floor today if that had happened this week. But it has not 
happened.
  You have made progress. What is wrong, Mr. Chairman, with coming back 
here at the end of next week, reporting your work product and saying: 
Give us another extension and we will put it in final. That is a report 
to American agriculture, the kind they now deserve, more than they did 
6 months ago. This is the fourth extension you have asked for, and I am 
simply saying I will give you one more,

[[Page S3341]]

but you said it--the House is going out tomorrow. Is that a sense of 
urgency, that they are not staying here and working and completing the 
work? Give them 2 weeks and they will go out another 3 days.
  America's farming community senses urgency at this moment. I hope we 
do. I know you do, and I know the ranking member did. In no way is this 
a criticism of your work product and your work effort. You have done a 
marvelous job. But I think it is time collectively Congress get their 
work finished.
  I thank the Senator for yielding.
  Mr. HARKIN. We just have a disagreement on this issue. I guess, due 
to the objection--I guess we will be back here probably again next week 
asking for another extension.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Georgia is 
recognized.
  Mr. CHAMBLISS. Let me say by way of reporting where we are on this 
bill to all of our colleagues that we have 13 titles on the farm bill. 
We have now closed six of those titles. I think by the end of the day 
there is the opportunity for us to close at least a couple more of 
those titles, maybe even more. Despite the fact that the House is going 
out today and we are still going to be here, the principals involved in 
this from the conference standpoint as well as staff are going to 
continue to work through this all through the weekend, as all of our 
staff have done for all of these 6 months. Staff has been unbelievable, 
trying to wade through this.
  But here is our practical problem. We have never had this problem 
with the farm bill. This is the third one I have been involved in as a 
Member of Congress--I have also been participating in several others--
and I have never seen this situation before; that is, we had to go to 
the Finance Committee and Ways and Means Committee to ask them for some 
spending savings and some revenue measures to allow us to write a farm 
bill that is truly a meaningful safety net for our farmers and 
ranchers.
  But just as important, because 66 percent of the funding in this farm 
bill is going to our nutrition programs--our food stamps, our school 
lunches, our food banks, all of which are so integrally important and 
all of which are within the jurisdiction of the Agriculture Committee--
we have had to look to Ways and Means to finance like we never had to 
before.
  Second, the Senate had a tax package that is $7 billion on our bill 
that did not appear in the House bill. We had a lot of disagreement, a 
lot of argument about that. But as of last night, I think we made some 
real progress. As I have already told my friend from Idaho, I think his 
coming to the floor last week and trying to tighten the screw and 
saying he would object to another extension has had an impact on that, 
and I am not unappreciative of the efforts of Senator Craig.
  But here we are today on the very verge, I think, based upon a 
meeting Senator Harkin and I were in this morning. As soon as we leave 
here, we go back into another meeting. We are going to stay there until 
we get some of these key issues resolved. We are now getting to the 
point where, I think, within a short term--I hope it is Monday, I hope 
it is no later than that--it may be, but I hope we can come back in and 
stand on this floor and say that we have reached an accord and that we 
are going to be writing that bill over the course of the next 10 days, 
2 weeks, whatever it may be that it takes to physically get the job 
done from the committee paper standpoint. But we are very close. And I 
think there is an opportunity to get this done. It is not going to be 
done, completed, in the next week, but I have no problem with a 1-week 
extension because I do think it will keep the pressure on. It will 
require us to ultimately get something done.
  Another factor in here is the White House. The White House has to be 
involved because the President has to sign whatever product we send to 
him.
  Another problem is, if it were up to Senator Harkin and me, we would 
have had this bill done long ago. We had the shortest session in the 
Senate Agriculture Committee when we reported this bill out of the 
committee under your leadership. We got it done in a day and a half. We 
went into conference, and we appointed our conferees fairly quickly. It 
took the House almost 6 months to appoint their conferees. We have 11 
conferees, the House has 49 conferees, all of whom have to be available 
to be in 1 room at the same time and all of whom had the opportunity to 
discuss their particular part of this bill. It has been a nightmare 
from that standpoint, but we are getting closer.
  I appreciate the Senator from Idaho being reasonable with us as far 
as us getting a 1-week extension, and I would implore that we move 
forward with it, send it to the House, and hopefully get this 
concluded.
  I yield the floor.
  Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I wish to echo a little bit what my friend 
from Georgia just said. I will say in all candor to my friend from 
Idaho that his action last week had an effect. I will be very frank 
about that. It did not go unnoticed in our deliberations. Frankly, I 
think it caused us to do a lot of things in the last week. So I give 
that to my friend from Idaho.
  I guess the only reason I was a little upset, I think sometimes when 
we try to do some things that are unrealistic--I think the specter of 
what you said last week was pretty realistic, and that caused us to do 
some things. I guess my only problem with this is that I think everyone 
recognizes that even though we are very close, we can get this done 
before next week, it cannot get done legislatively, the paperwork. 
Sometimes if you hold something out that is unrealistic, people tend to 
pooh-pooh it and say: Oh well, we will get another extension and we can 
dribble along. But if you know the curtain is coming down, then things 
happen. That is why I asked for 2 weeks. People know that is realistic. 
We have to get it done. It has to be done. But if it is 1 week, then, 
well, we will come back next week, and hopefully we can get whatever 
extension is necessary to get the paperwork done and everything.
  I want to say again, Senator Chambliss and I--all of us on the 
Agriculture Committee worked very hard. The groundwork was laid when 
Senator Chambliss was chairman of the committee. When it changed hands 
after the last election and I was privileged to take over as chairman, 
we worked together. We passed a great farm bill in the Senate, 
something I was very proud of, and I think Senator Chambliss--all of us 
were. We passed a farm bill with 79 votes.
  Now, a lot of times people around the country--you hear them say: 
Can't you people quit your bickering and get things done? Well, I 
thought we did that on the farm bill. You can't get much better than 79 
votes. That is the most votes the farm bill has ever had on the Senate 
floor. So Republicans, Democrats, East, West, North, South--different 
regions all were supporting it. So you would think the administration 
might have said: Well, gee, with that, maybe we ought to work with them 
and get it done. But we got a veto threat right away.
  So, again, I thought we had a good product here when we passed it in 
the Senate. But, understanding that the House did not have the same 
views as we did, we had to go to conference. But I can say this again, 
that I hope in another farm bill that will come up 5 years from now, 
this is not going to happen again, that this is not going to happen 
again with the Finance Committee and the Ways and Means Committee 
basically controlling our agenda. They are good people. I do not want 
to cast aspersions on any committee or anything like that. But they 
have their agenda, they have what they want to do.
  The Agriculture Committee did its work. As Senator Chambliss said, if 
it had been just our bill, the Agriculture bill, we would have been 
done with this a long time ago. Our differences, whatever they are, are 
minor. We had basic agreements on different parameters and things such 
as that. So we had a good bill, and we have made good progress.
  The other thing I wanted to say as long as I have the floor is that 
the President is not doing us any favors by the White House issuing the 
statement that we should have a 1-year extension. For some of the 
reasons that I think the Senator from Idaho pointed out, prices going 
up and things like that, people expect us to do something. And one of 
the big parts of this whole farm

[[Page S3342]]

bill--in fact, the biggest part of this farm bill is nutrition. Over 60 
percent of this farm bill is nutrition; it is food stamps, it is the 
TEFAP program, the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program, WIC, it 
is all of these programs that help low-income people put food on their 
table. Yet we know, with the increasing prices of food, people are 
hurting, low-income people are hurting in this country.

  Well, with a 1-year extension, we give no relief at all to low-income 
families. In this bill, what we have agreed upon so far is roughly 
about $10 billion more--not base--$10 billion more in nutrition 
programs. Now, if we have a 1-year extension, that is gone. So I think 
we have an obligation here to help people who are low-income, who maybe 
had a job and lost it, who need to go on food stamps for a short period 
of time to be able to help their families. Well, if we have an 
extension, that will not happen.
  Energy. We hear a lot of talk--I think it is misguided--about some of 
the food going for ethanol and that is causing a lot of problems. That 
is not it at all. That is not it at all. A lot of people have the 
mistaken idea that the corn that is being made into ethanol is the corn 
people eat. That is not so. People do not eat that. It is not the kind 
of corn you buy and you eat on your plate at night. This is the corn 
which is fed to chickens and cows and hogs. Most of the hungry people 
in the world are not hungry because they are not getting meat; they are 
hungry because of subsistence diets. So the ethanol thing is kind of a 
bugaboo; that is a phony issue out there. But we recognize the limits, 
and we recognized that in the Energy bill we passed where we mandated a 
renewable fuels standard, but we said that, of that, no more than 15 
billion gallons a year from present sources, corn. So therefore we want 
to move aggressively into cellulosic ethanol, using wood products and 
waste products and things such as those for making ethanol. This bill 
pushes us in that direction, moves us aggressively in that direction. 
Well, if we have a 1-year extension, we will lose yet another year or 
two on that.
  Lastly, let me mention conservation. Millions and millions of acres 
are coming out to be used for crop production. You cannot stop it. 
These are contracts that farmers had to set aside land. The contracts 
are up. Because of the high prices of wheat and corn and beans and 
other commodities, farmers now see they can make money by planting row 
crops. That is fine. That is good. That will help keep the prices of 
food down. We need that productive capacity.
  That is what was so good about the Conservation Reserve Program. It 
was like a reservoir, that if we needed it at some time, we could use 
it. Well, now is the time. We are going to use it. And more crops will 
be planted on this land. But some of these lands are fragile, they are 
hilly, they are highly erodable. So therefore we need to put some 
incentives in there for farmers to do it right, to put in grass 
waterways, to put in buffer strips, to do minimum tillage, to do all 
that is necessary to conserve our soil and clean up our water. We can 
have production, and we can have good conservation. This bill puts a 
lot more money into the very conservation programs that will allow 
farmers to go out and plant and grow and yet be good conservationists. 
Yet, if we have a 1-year extension, we do not have that.
  So for that and for a lot of other reasons, I wish the White House 
would quit talking about that and say: Look, you have a good bill. You 
have done a lot of work. We will work with you. We will get this bill 
done, and the President will sign it into law. That is the kind of 
cooperation we need from the White House right now and not the veiled 
threats of a year extension, things like that.
  I think the Senator from Idaho is right, we have been so locked up in 
meetings on this that perhaps Senators and their staffs and others have 
not really been brought up to speed on what we are doing. I want to 
take this opportunity to bring them up to speed as to where we are in 
all of these negotiations.
  We are very close. We are meeting right now again at 10:30 and will 
proceed on today, tomorrow, through the weekend if necessary to get 
this done.
  I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read three times and passed, 
the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table with no intervening 
action or debate, and any statements related to the bill be printed in 
the Record.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Is there objection?
  Mr. CRAIG. Mr. President, no objection, but this was the original at 
the desk, not the one amended by the Chair?
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator is correct.
  Mr. CRAIG. I thank the Chair.
  Mr. Chairman, let me thank you for that report. I do not know if 
there is anyone here in ag country who does not want your work product 
to become policy as soon as possible.
  I think the colloquy this morning has been extremely valuable. Please 
go back to work.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  The bill (S. 2903) was ordered to a third reading, was read the third 
time, and passed, as follows:

                                S. 2903

       Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of 
     the United States of America in Congress assembled,

     SECTION 1. ADDITIONAL TEMPORARY EXTENSION OF AGRICULTURAL 
                   PROGRAMS AND SUSPENSION OF PERMANENT PRICE 
                   SUPPORT AUTHORITIES.

       Effective April 25, 2008, section 1 of Public Law 110-196 
     (122 Stat. 653) (as amended by Public Law 110-200 (122 Stat. 
     695)) is amended--
       (1) in subsection (a), by striking ``April 25, 2008'' and 
     inserting ``May 2, 2008''; and
       (2) in subsection (d), by striking ``April 25, 2008'' and 
     inserting ``May 2, 2008''.

  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Massachusetts.

                          ____________________