Farm Bill: Pelosi's Wish For More Reform
Can Bush Grant It?
The AP's Mary Clare Jalonick reported this afternoon that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "a suppporter of the bill, said she wished it had gone further in limiting payments to wealthy farmers but praised increases for nutrition programs, including food stamps and emergency domestic food assistance, by more than $10 billion. The measure would also expand a program to provide fresh fruits and vegetables to schoolchildren."
Bush's insistence on more subsidy reform, the core of the public case he is making for a veto, could end up granting Pelosi her wish. But first the administration has to muster the votes to sustain his veto. The only real shot is in the House.
The question is, how will this veto dance between Bush and Pelosi unfold. (I'm putting Harry Reid aside because a veto override appears hardest in the House and highly unlikely in the Senate.)
Will Bush just veto the bill, throw up his hands, and make another half-hearted suggestion that the 2002 bill be extended for a year or two? Unlikely. Extension would infuriate his fiscally conservative base. They hate the current bill and would harshly criticize a sequel. Nor would a simple extension be the logical finale to the two years his administration spent in nationwide farm bill listening sessions, developing its own detailed farm bill proposal, and making nonstop appeals for subsidy reform that have earned almost universal praise for the president on editorial pages across the country. Why, after all that, would Bush hand the keys back to the subsidy lobby to drive farm policy for another two years?
And for all the big talk from the subsidy lobby, as recently as 18 months ago, that they would simply muscle a 2002 extension through congress, that option was, and remains, impossible with Democrats in control. A straight extension can't pass the House, and probably couldn't pass the Senate.
Which raises the question of what counter offer, if any, Bush might present over the next week as he reaches for his veto pen? And how and to whom he will present it?
So far the president's rejection of the bill has focused on inadequate income caps for subsidies, other excesses in the commodity title, the costly new "permanent disaster assistance" program, failure to convert a portion of foreign food aid to local purchases, and sundry other issues. Add to that list, of course, what the White House terms the "bloated" cost of the bill.
For the most part, however, the administration has not raised veto-level objections to any of the provisions that advocates for sustainable food and agriculture, conservation or social justice tend to like about the bill. That list includes the increase for food assistance to the poor that Pelosi and other bill supporters are hyper-ventilating about.
Here's one way to put that food assistance increase in perspective: at $10.3 billion over 10 years, it is equivalent to the direct payments that subsidized farmers will collect in just the next two years (at $5.1 to $5.2 billion per year) under the conference agreement. That's as good a measure as any of the lousy deal Pelosi and her staff cut last summer, when the subsidy lobby took her to the cleaners and most of the Democratic caucus with her.
But those numbers also suggests how relatively easy it would be for Bush to accommodate Pelosi on food assistance, conservation and other farm bill items that matter most to her and to the majority of her caucus. It would then fall to her to nudge the House position closer to Bush on commodity policy. Then it would be up to the Senate to accept the compromise, or pack for a trip back in time to 1949.
Of course, none of this will matter unless the president can demonstrate that he has one-third of the House behind his veto--comprised of most of his party and some Democrats. The fact that he has a decent shot has the House Democratic leadership and the subsidy lobby working alongside, overtime, to override his veto, and sundry other interest groups, some queasy progressives among them, tagging along--again.
