An Urban's Rural View

Charlie Stenholm's passions during his 26 years as a Democratic Congressman from Texas were supporting agriculture and balancing the federal budget. That makes him a good man to listen to on the interaction between the two House-Senate conference committees meeting today, the one trying to reconcile different versions of the farm bill and the other trying to hash out a budget deal.

Unfortunately for agriculture, what he has to say isn't encouraging.

Serving as the moderator of a Farm Foundation panel discussion on the farm bill, Stenholm hammered home an inconvenient fact: It will be difficult for the farm-bill conferees to make meaningful progress until the budget conferees "give them a number." How much must agriculture contribute to cutting the budget?

Without that number, any compromises the farm-bill conferees make on big-ticket items like food stamps will be wasted if the budget conferees end up demanding bigger cuts.

At the very least this inconvenient fact pours cold water on talk of a farm-bill deal by Thanksgiving. The budget conferees' deadline is December 13. Chances of getting an ag number before then are slim. As panelist Joe Outlaw of Texas A & M put it, "In political gamesmanship you don't throw out a number" sooner when you might be able to get a better number later.

And delay isn't the worst-case scenario. What if the budget conferees fail to agree on a deal? That could well happen, Stenholm thinks. "The budget committee has to do a job it hasn't been willing to do until now -- make the kind of compromises we're talking about" on the farm bill, he said. "I don't see how it can possibly get there."

Not that farm-bill compromises are a done deal. Outlaw, for one, is a doubter. He was asked to predict whether the conferees would reach agreement or whether a farm bill would end up being tacked on to a must-pass piece of legislation like the budget. His response: "In my heart of hearts I think it's going to have to be part of a different piece of legislation."

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

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