[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 16]
[House]
[Page 21491]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1030
                 CALLING FOR EXTENSION OF MILC PROGRAM

  (Mr. OBEY asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. OBEY. Mr. Speaker, last year in the conference on the disaster 
supplemental, Senate conferees passed a provision extending the MILC 
program for 2 years, and the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Sherwood) 
and I had lined up enough votes on the House side to accept that 
amendment. To prevent that from happening, the Republican chairman of 
the conference gaveled the meeting to a close, and we never met again 
on the subject. Despite the fact that the President had said in my 
hometown on that same day that he favored the extension of the MILC 
program, when my office called the White House asking him to intervene 
in order to get that conference reopened so that the MILC program could 
be extended, the White House declined.
  That program is now scheduled to expire at the end of this week. If 
that happens, we will have lost an important safety net for Wisconsin's 
family dairy farmers. I urge the House agriculture authorizing 
committee to immediately report out to this floor an action extending 
the MILC program so that we do not lose that vital program, and I urge 
the Republican leadership of the House to see to it that the committee 
does just that.

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