A deeply polarizing farm bill passed the House on party lines Thursday, a month after the legislation went down to stunning defeat after getting ensnared in the toxic politics of immigration.
The legislation, which passed 213-211, includes controversial new work rules for most adult food-stamp recipients — provisions that are dead on arrival in the Senate. The massive legislative package overseeing more than $430 billion of food and agriculture programs contains a host of measures aimed at strengthening farm subsidies, expanding foreign trade and bolstering rural development.
The bill was championed by a dwindling number of farm-district Republicans who feel duty-bound to deliver farm supports to their rural constituents. On the first go-round last month, this group lost out to an increasingly powerful cohort of conservatives who are more interested in winning political points on welfare reform and immigration.
The tense divide between the two camps has huge implications for the future of food and farm policy in the United States, as well as the Republican Party itself. Even as the bill advances from the House, political analysts said, the tensions revealed in its lurching, divisive journey are likely to persist.
It's going to advance directly into a buzzsaw as it'll never get past a filbuster in the Senate, but sure.
“People think, ‘who cares about the Farm Bill? It’s so boring,’” said Adam Sheingate, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. “But it’s a window into contemporary politics right now, particularly among Republicans — the struggles they face balancing the responsibility of governing against their ideological commitments.”
The most divisive element of the legislation passed Thursday are new, stricter work rules for most able-bodied adults in the food stamp program, the federal safety net that provides an average of $125 per month in grocery money to 42.3 million Americans. Under the proposal, adults will have to spend 20 hours per week either working or participating in a state-run training program to receive benefits.
Democrats and anti-hunger advocates say most states do not have the capacity to scale up case management or training programs to this extent. As a result, they argue, hundreds of thousands of low-income adults could end up losing benefits.
"Hundreds of thousands of adults losing benefits" is the entire point, guys.
The legislation also directs the Department of Agriculture to reevaluate school lunch nutrition standards adopted under the Obama administration. It proposes to expand who counts as a “farmer” for purposes of subsidies, the compensation USDA distributes when crop prices fall below predetermined references.
It eliminates much of the Conservation Stewardship Program — aimed at encouraging farmers to address soil, air and water quality on their land — and folds it into the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which is oriented toward compensating farmers for one-off conservation projects. And despite efforts by some lawmakers to end them, it extends federal supports for the U.S. sugar industry through programs that control the amount of foreign and domestic sugar on the U.S. market and guarantee a minimum price for producers if sugar prices drop.
So massive sugar subsidies will continue while we stop paying farmers for actually being environmentally good farmers. You know, the people that grow crops in soil might actually need clean water, air, and land free of toxic sludge but that's all a liberal trick anyway.
Cartoonishly evil and it's a waste of time to boot, that's your GOP.
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