Even before the U.S. Congress returns from its five-week, no-work period to its usual three-day weeks of little work, Republicans in both chambers are signaling to global markets, the White House and their colleagues that their return will bring no 2023 Farm Bill and no 2024 U.S. federal budget by the Sept. 30 drop-dead date for the two laws.
It’s not news that both efforts were bumping against hard deadlines. It is news, though, that any attempt at either has been pre-emptively rejected six solid weeks before both expire.
To be fair, it’s not both chambers. Senate budget boss Patty Murray (a Democrat) pushed all 12 spending bills through her appropriations committee by July 27. The House, on the other hand, approved just one.
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Worse – if it’s possible to have a “worse” at this late date – neither chamber has a draft Farm Bill before their respective ag committee, let alone a committee-approved one anywhere. An even higher hurdle, an approved joint Senate-House version of the bill, lies somewhere in the distant mist.
The mist grew thicker Aug. 21 when the fractious, deeply divided House Freedom Caucus announced that “its members will not support a stopgap funding bill to keep the government running past the end of next month,” reported the , “… unless several conservative policy priorities … are attached.”
Some of those priorities aren’t so much conservative as they are burn-the-barn-down revolutionary. Defund the “weaponized” Department of Justice and reform the “woke” Pentagon are two of the big ones.
While neither is remotely doable, say observers, both are monkey wrenches that the 36-or-so-member caucus will use to make the next month a 24-7 nightmare for Kevin McCarthy, the speaker in the U.S. House of Representatives.
That’s a self-inflicted disaster, however, because McCarthy gave the revolutionaries an unlimited supply of monkey wrenches when he traded key House committee seats for member votes in his ugly intraparty fight for the speaker’s post.
The ag side of the House is just as tied up by the GOP’s monkey wrenchers as the budget side. In early June, House ag chair Glenn Thompson (a Republican), let it be known that he would have no trouble if the House voted “to strip the Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) spending for climate-friendly agriculture practices” from any new Farm Bill.
But, Thompson noted, his plan would only apply to “… the dollars [that] have been authorized but the checks haven’t been written yet…”
That brief whiff of budgetary blood was sniffed out by the Freedom Caucus almost immediately and it began to bay for repeal of the entire $19.5-billion IRA.
What might be spared in the new Farm Bill, however, is a GOP plan to use the Farm Bill to overrule 15 states that have instituted local standards on certain animal products.
The effort, coming mostly from Senate Republicans, is a reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s May decision that allowed California’s Prop 12 to stand. The GOP sponsors say the ruling allows “liberal” states to undermine the much-needed, industrial model of food production.
Baloney, say small farm advocates and more than 90 House members who argue the GOP effort is anti-family, anti-farmer and anti-local control.
All, you’d think, that any group that truly believes in freedom would oppose.
– The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.S. and Canada. Past columns, supporting documents, and contact information are posted at farmandfoodfile.com.
