Senate farm bill passes by crushing margin

The Senate June 28 passed its version of the 2018 farm bill by an overwhelming bipartisan vote of 86 to 11.

The Senate Agriculture Committee will be in a strong position in negotiations with the House Agriculture Committee in conference, key senators said.

“I thought it was a strong vote,” Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-KS, told reporters immediately after the Senate adjourned until after the Independence Day break.

“Today marks an important day for farm country. We are one step closer to providing farmers and ranchers a farm bill with the certainty and predictability they deserve,” Roberts said in a statement. “I thank my partner in this journey, Ranking Member Stabenow, as well as many of our Senate colleagues who offered leadership and expertise. I am proud we have a strong, budget neutral farm bill with broad support.”

Senate Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Debbie Stabenow, D-MI, said the manager’s package incorporated 171 bipartisan bills and amendments.

“We worked hard to build a coalition,” Stabenow said, adding she hopes the House will look at how “broad” the support was.

 “The 2018 Senate farm bill proves that bipartisanship is a tried and true approach to getting things done,” Stabenow said in a statement. “By working across the aisle, we crafted a farm bill that strengthens our diverse agricultural economy and all the jobs it supports in Michigan and across the county. I want to thank Chairman Roberts for his leadership and partnership, along with our Senate colleagues who contributed their ideas for improving American agriculture.”

Compared to the House version of the farm bill, considered revolutionary for changes to conservation programs and the addition of work requirements for recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program payments, the Senate version is considered evolutionary by bill managers, since it tweaks some faulty programs, particularly for dairy producers, and improves on others, such as conservation, farm payments and crop insurance.

It’s on those issues—particularly SNAP and the restrictions on the eligibility for farm payments—that likely will be the most contentious issues as the two versions of the bill move toward a conference committee to hash out differences. The two sides must meet a Sept. 30 deadline imposed by the expiration of the current 2008 farm bill to get a bill signed into law by President Donald Trump.

The Senate farm bill doesn’t include work requirements for SNAP recipients as the House version does, but it has additional state pilot programs to include work requirements along with steps to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the program, something Roberts told reporters after the final vote the Senate hasn’t gotten enough credit.

“If you look at what we did, without the backdrop of what the House did, it is terribly significant and is right on the money of getting integrity into the program,” Roberts said. “I needed to really talk about that more to my Republican colleagues and, who knows, we could have hit 90 (votes).”

All the same, the House-Senate conference is expected to be contentious.

“We know conference committee is going to be a wild and woolly debate as we go forward on a number of things," Stabenow said on the Senate floor after debate ended.

Republicans cast all 11 negative votes on the farm bill. Area members voting against the Senate farm bill were both members of the Oklahoma delegation, Sens. Jim Inhofe and James Langford.

The final day of debate saw a couple of amendments go down to defeat while Roberts and Stabenow added 11 amendments in another managers’ package prior to the vote for final passage.

For instance, the Senate rejected by a vote of 68 to 30 an amendment that combined the proposals of Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, John Kennedy of Louisiana, and Ted Cruz of Texas, to not only include a House-style work requirement plan but also requiring SNAP beneficiaries to show photo identification to buy food.

In sending the amendment to a vote to table the Lee-Kennedy-Cruz amendment, Stabenow listed a number of groups, including the National Grocers Association, strongly in opposition since it would have held retailers responsible if the photo IDs were wrong.

An amendment offered by Lee and Sen. Cory Booker, D-NJ, to impose limits on checkoff research and promotion programs, also was defeated by a vote of 57 to 38.

Once again, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, R-TN; and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-PA; attempted to propose an amendment to restrict President Trump’s ability to impose tariffs on the basis of national security. It was blocked once again.

Much of the work to create the Senate farm bill, however, occurred behind the scenes as Roberts, Stabenow, and their staffs worked to solve issues of individual members inserting amendments that could lead to bill’s failure, rather than the high-margin passage it received.

For example, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-FL, had blocked a unanimous consent request to an amendment by Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., to allow U.S. Department of Agriculture trade promotion program spending at entities owned by the Cuban military.

The final managers’ package included a Rubio amendment that will restrict that spending to non-military establishments. Heitkamp told reporters she agreed to drop her amendment and support Rubio’s amendment to move the farm bill along.

Also, it had been reported Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, agreed with Roberts not to bring up an amendment to impose a means test on crop insurance premium subsidies. The amendment, co-sponsored by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-IA, would have reduced premium subsidies by 15 percentage points for policyholders with adjusted gross incomes exceeding $700,000, the same income limit that is in the bill for commodity programs.

Roberts told reporters he worked with Durbin to instead include an unrelated amendment in the bill’s final managers’ package to reauthorize the rural emergency medical services training and equipment assistance program in the Public Health Service Act.

Also included in the manager’s package was an amendment sponsored by Sen. John Thune, R-SD, allowing producers may change their election to participate in agriculture risk coverage or price loss coverage in the 2021 crop year, part of a host of risk management and conservation amendments Thune placed into the bill.

House and Senate conferees are expected to be appointed soon after the Independence Day break. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway, R-TX, said in a statement, “Passage today of the Senate farm bill reflects a hard-fought victory, and I commend Chairman Roberts for his tireless efforts. I look forward to working together to send a strong, new farm bill to the president’s desk.”

House Agriculture Committee Ranking Member Collin Peterson, D-MN, meanwhile, has said in previous statement he’s strongly opposed the House SNAP provisions and has said he intends to side with the Senate on most if not all issues in the conference.

The House passed its bill by a vote of 213 to 211, with only Republicans voting for it. 

Larry Dreiling can be reached at 785-628-1117 or [email protected].