Rep. Loebsack - Farm bill needs action

Henderson: It appears that this whole debate about Syria is the nail in the coffin for the farm bill. Is there any prospect for a five year farm bill? If not, is there any prospect for extending it for another year? We even hear that maybe that won't happen. Loebsack: That's a great question, Kay, and something that has been consuming a lot of my time over the last year for that matter. Since last year, of course, we had an extension. The Senate passed a farm bill, the House didn't get its act together enough to be able to pass a farm bill. We're seeing the same thing playing out again this time only I think even more intently on the House side because, you know, we had a vote in the House and I was one of 24 democrats who voted for the farm bill. I didn't like the SNAP cuts, the nutrition cuts but I thought the right thing to do was to get this over to the Senate to have a compromise on this thing in a conference committee and that failed. And it failed, sure, because some democrats didn't vote for it but it failed because there are a lot of republicans who were elected the last couple of times who don't like nutrition, they don't like crop insurance subsidies, they simply don't like government and that's really where we are now. We've got to have leadership I think on the part of Speaker Boehner, he has got to bring those folks together and make sure that we can get something through the House so we can get it over to the Senate. We shouldn't have gone home for five and a half weeks this summer. The Speaker sent us home and that was the wrong thing to do especially with this and so many other things hanging out there at the time.