WASHINGTON - Pressured by President Bush
to scrap a rewrite of agriculture policy, which expires at the end of the week, House and Senate members trying to combine the two chambers' versions of the farm bill took a break Wednesday from formal negotiations.
The conference adjourned Tuesday night without reaching an agreement on the basic framework of the legislation.
But "there's room for a deal," announced Iowa's Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee and a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
"We're getting closer," agreed Sen. Max Baucus
of Montana, the finance committee chairman.
"We'd like to go do our discussions and hope to get back to you with better news," said House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, as he and Baucus prepared to leave the meeting room. "We just have to get over this one hurdle." The hurdle Rangel referred to is how much the bill will cost and how to pay for it. His committee and the Senate Finance Committee are both charged with writing tax policy. Their involvement, and turf issues that have stemmed from it, have complicated the bill's completion.
Senate negotiators were still waiting to hear back from their House counterparts on a proposal to raise spending on farm, nutrition and conservation programs by $10 billion over ten years, and to include a set of $2.5 billion tax incentives for farmers and the forestry industry that were presented as being fully "offset," or budget neutral.
Rather than reconvene the entire conference committee of House and Senate negotiators, leaders of both chambers' agriculture committees and the House and Senate committees charged with tax issues held informal meetings Wednesday.
Individual members also had "gentle" conversations, with one another, according to Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln.
She said it was unclear what the level of funding for disaster relief and conservation would be in a final bill, but she said she was confident that cuts in direct payments, which had been pushed by House members, would not be included in an agreement.
"I think the House is listening," she said. "It's at a snail's pace, but at least we're moving." Although Sen. Larry Craig, an Idaho Republican, has announced that he would attempt to kill another extension on the Senate floor, Lincoln was confident the measure would pass.
It is not clear whether another extension would pass with a veto-proof majority in both chambers.
President Bush,
who has already agreed to extend current agriculture policy three times as Congress hashes things out, was less optimistic.
He said there were "no signs" that the committee will reach an agreement acceptable to him by Friday. "I therefore call on Congress to provide our agricultural producers with the certainty to make sound business and planting decisions about this year's crop by extending our current law for at least one year." Rep. Jim McCrery of Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the Ways and Means Committee was less optimistic than other members about reaching a deal. He acknowledged that the split on the bill wasn't necessarily along partisan lines, saying that Republicans in the House wouldn't simply hew to the White House line on the bill.
Still, he cautioned other members of the committee that "we do have a limit." He said an extension "makes sense" because it would give farmers "certainty" about federal policy over the next year.Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
