Drought-stricken farmers are still waiting for help from Congress. House GOP has issues to resolve

After the escapism of Tampa, House Republicans face two quick reality checks this month: funding the government past Sept. 30 and extending the safety net for farmers amid the worst drought in a generation.

Indeed, September’s song is very much this disconnect between the bold rhetoric of the Republican convention and the grittier backroom deals and problems facing Congress before it rushes back home for the elections.


“We choose to limit government,” Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman and the new vice presidential nominee, told Tampa’s delegates. But nonemergency appropriations will go up — not down — by $8 billion in the six-month stopgap bill now taking shape in the House.

Negotiators worked through the weekend in hopes of filing the measure late Monday or Tuesday. Select priority accounts will get plus-ups, but to speed things along, billions were expected to be distributed through an across-the-board formula — a remarkable turn for Republicans.

Farmers won’t have the same luck.

Hundreds are slated to rally Wednesday at the Capitol, demanding action on a long delayed, five-year farm bill. But August has passed with no real progress, and coming out of Tampa the overwhelming sense is that the fix is in — for what could be described as a monumental legislative failure by this Congress.

The Senate passed its farm bill in June. The House Agriculture Committee followed within weeks. But two months later, the GOP leadership is paralyzed, torn between doing something for the rural economy vs. trumpeting the party’s attacks on food stamps as a new form of welfare under President Barack Obama.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) seems most intent on stalling for time until after the election and then pushing through a one-year extension of current policy in the turmoil of the lame-duck session. “A ship trying to sail on yesterday’s wind” was Ryan’s artful putdown of Obama. Yet , House Republicans aren’t even allowing their farm bill out of the harbor.

A short-term disaster aid package may still be salvaged, but House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.) is sounding grim. “I don’t know that there’s been a huge amount of movement,” he told POLITICO. And the same pessimism is echoed by Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, the ranking Democrat on the panel.

“It’s a big failure. I just don’t see any good scenarios,” Peterson said. “I think something happened in Tampa and a decision was made. That’s how I read it.”

November will decide if there is any political price. And the supreme irony of this oft-ignored debate is it could come back to bite in the very same Midwest and Great Plains states that figure now in the battle for the White House and Congress.

Obama is not without blame for the debacle. Perhaps out of fear of the food stamp welfare charge, the White House has seemed painfully slow to recognize the import of the farm bill impasse — and lost opportunity for reform. But with Iowa in play, the president has begun to step up, and the state clearly figures heavily in his reelection strategy.

“There’s no replacement for a serious farm bill that gives farmers certainty over the long term,” he told Cedar Rapids television in a recent campaign stop. “I will keep on pushing it, and my expectation is the Congress needs to get it done before they adjourn completely prior to the election.”

Down the ballot, two Republican freshman stars in the House, Reps. Rick Berg of North Dakota and Kristi Noem of South Dakota, each have been thrown on the defensive because of the GOP’s failure to act.

Berg’s Senate race has national implications: Republicans are banking on the North Dakota seat to win control in November. But Berg failed to even mention the farm bill when given the chance to speak in Tampa — something that both his home press and Democratic opponent, Heidi Heitkamp, have hammered him on since.

“If you are going to lead, you have to know what you are for, and Rick Berg doesn’t,” Heitkamp told POLITICO. “Agriculture is the No. One wealth creator in North Dakota and he doesn’t think about agriculture.”

Caught most in the middle is Lucas. He is the consummate good soldier, a likable one-time rancher still learning the ropes of being chairman. But he must decide soon if he’s willing to take the bull by the horns.

There’s ample room for compromise on both food stamps and crop insurance to generate billions in new savings — and light a spark. Waiting for 2013 is not to his advantage, both politically and technically: The Congressional Budget Office is already expected to downsize some of its farm bill savings estimates next year.

“Whether I have a brand new administration or a second-term administration with even less interest in rural America,” Lucas said, “it’s better to do this now than it is to do it in whatever the world may hold for us in 2013.”

He also fears that a true swing election will make it harder to reach consensus. “I’m a little concerned that somebody wins all the marbles,” he said. “When you are trying to build a coalition in the middle, and that’s what a farm bill is all about, that’s a little scary.”

“Next year, the crop insurance checks are going to go out because the agreements were made in this crop year. We’re going to have one last round of direct payment money in October. … But once you get past this crop year, past this calendar year, those things that were a key part of the safety net are not there anymore if you don’t have a new farm bill.”

“But again we live in a society where unfortunately not just urban America but also rural America tends to have kind of a short frame of reference.”

Boehner’s other restless chairman is Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), who leads the House Appropriations Committee. Virtually all of the chairman’s work for this year is being wiped out with the continuing resolution expected to come to the floor this week. If Lucas feels alone on the range, Rogers resembles one very wet Kentucky wildcat.

Boehner agreed to the deal as a concession to conservatives, who are betting that Romney will win in November, allowing new cuts. But for six months at least, it’s a wholesale shift from the spending levels given to Rogers by the House budget last spring.

Negotiators have agreed to cap overseas war funding at Obama’s reduced request for 2013. This decision also allows Republicans to argue that total appropriations will be coming down from 2012 levels. But the $1.047 trillion CR target is a full $8 billion over the latest CBO estimates for the current rate of non-emergency annual spending for 2013. And it is almost $20 billion over what Ryan had envisioned for 2013.

The $8 billion increase shown by the CBO is less than a 1 percent difference but still an embarrassment of riches for some in the party. And it sets up a dilemma for Rogers, whose first preference is to make the CR as rigid and mechanized as possible so members will come around to helping him pass a more flexible omnibus package in the spring.

In an almost comical proposal, the White House had suggested its own “continuing resolution fund” — a brand new account at the Treasury from which excess monies can be allocated. This won little support from the Appropriations leadership. But given the political sensitivities, House and Senate negotiators were still tight-lipped about what their alternative will be.

The two core issues are how much — if any — of the $8 billion should go to defense and second what will be the ratio between individual plus-ups and a more generic across-the-board increase. Given its budget requests, the White House would like to maximize the share going to its specific domestic priorities, and by Sunday afternoon, the administration was said to be engaged.

The situation was described as fluid, but Appropriations clerks were called in to work in anticipation of a potential deal.