This just disgusts me. Americans are hanging from a cliff by their fingers as Republicans break them, one by one. And the Democrats are heroes because they stop them from breaking as many fingers as quickly as the Republicans had planned. Yay, America!
WASHINGTON (AP) — A House plan to make major cuts to food stamps would be scaled back under a bipartisan agreement on a massive farm bill, a near end to a more than two-year fight that has threatened to hurt rural lawmakers in an election year.
The measure announced Monday by the House and Senate Agriculture committees preserves food stamp benefits for most Americans who receive them and continues generous subsidies for farmers. The House was expected to vote on the bill Wednesday, with the Senate following shortly after.
The compromise was expected to cut food stamps by about $800 million a year, or around 1 percent. The House in September passed legislation cutting 5 percent from the $80 billion-a-year program. The House bill also would have allowed states to implement broad new work requirements for food stamp recipients. That has been scaled back to a test program in 10 states.
The Democratic-led Senate had twice passed a bill with only $400 million in annual food stamp cuts, and had signaled it would not go much higher. The White House had threatened to veto the House level of food stamp cuts.
The final bill released Monday would cost almost $100 billion a year over five years, with a cut of around $2.3 billion a year overall from current spending. Committee aides said they were still waiting for final numbers from the Congressional Budget Office to assess exactly how much the bill would cost.
Republican House leaders said they would support the deal. After wavering for several years, the GOP leaders were seeking to put the long-stalled bill behind them and build on the success of a bipartisan budget passed earlier this month. Leaders in both parties also were hoping to bolster rural candidates in this year's midterm elections.
Still unclear, though, was how Republicans would get the votes they needed to pass the final bill on the House floor. The full House rejected an earlier version of the farm bill in June after conservative Republicans said cuts to food stamps weren't high enough — and that bill had more than two times the cuts than those in the compromise bill announced Monday.
Some of those conservatives were certain to oppose the lower cuts to food stamps, along with many of the farm subsidies the bill offered.
While many liberal Democrats were expected to vote against the legislation, saying the food stamp cuts were too high, Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, and his Senate counterpart, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., have attempted a balanced bill to attract votes from the more moderate wings of both parties. They have touted the bill's overall savings and the elimination of a $5 billion-a-year farm subsidy called direct payments, which are now paid to farmers whether they farm or not.
