By Ryan Hanrahan
Bloomberg Government’s Lillianna Byington reported that “the Senate’s version of the farm bill isn’t expected to be put to a vote in the chamber before the election and instead senators and House lawmakers will informally conference to work out differences, Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman John Boozman (R-Ark.) said Thursday.”
“‘We’ll get together with the House and the Senate and discuss and figure out a path,’ Boozman said,” according to Byington’s reporting. “‘We don’t have time to put it on the floor right now, so we’ll be conferencing until after the election.'”
RFD-TV’s Marion Kirkpatrick and David Nelson reported that Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) said “I do think it will wait until after the election. We have one week remaining on the Senate calendar before we break before the November elections. So, I sat down with Senator John Boozman this morning, and we were strategizing on how we move this forward. But unfortunately, it will be a little bit of a wait until we get after that election cycle.”
And KLIN’s Johnnie Adcox reported that U.S. Sen. Pete Ricketts “said committee Chair John Boozman is negotiating with Democrats over when states with high error rates in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would have to pay a larger share of benefits. He said Democrats want a two-year delay, while a one-year delay has also been offered. Ricketts said Boozman sounded optimistic about reaching an agreement when they spoke late last week.“
Analyst Says Compromise Bill May Be Needed
Agri-Pulse’s Noah Wicks, Kim Chipman, and Olivia M. Bridges reported that the farm bill “legislation needs bipartisan backing to pass the full Senate, meaning negotiations for a revised bill need to begin in earnest as soon as possible.”
“A compromise bill could potentially be passed in the Senate by being attached to ‘must pass’ legislation this year,” Wicks, Chipman and Bridges reported. “‘I don’t think this is going to see the light of day on the Senate floor,’ says Randy Russell, who leads The Russell Group, a government relations firm specializing in food, agriculture and energy policy. ‘It’s much more likely that they work together at the staff level, try to come up with a compromise on the farm bill between the House and Senate, and then add that on to what is a conference report before the end of the year,’ Russell says in a recent Agri-Pulse Open Mic episode.”
Source : illinois.edu