Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of the Kind amendment. I commend the gentleman from Wisconsin for offering this. You know, we've heard here that we need this program to make us trade compliant. Many of us warned when we did the last farm bill that if we did this level of subsidies that it would run afoul of our trade agreements. Yet we plowed ahead and did it anyway. And then April of last year is when our farm programs, which on their best day are out of step with reality, moved into the realm of the absurd when we hatched a program to actually fund an institute in Brazil to fund the cotton industry there to start subsidizing the Brazilians so that we could continue to subsidize our own farmers. Is that not absurd? Why are we continuing to do this? It was raised before that we've got to do this to make us trade compliant now where tariffs might be imposed. That is true, but I offered an amendment in the committee earlier on that would have taken money from the direct payments that we currently pay to cotton farmers and paid off the Brazilians with that money rather than raid the Treasury and raid the taxpayers once again. And guess what? That passed in committee but was stricken when it came to the floor. So when you hear all this rhetoric about, hey, we want to be trade compliant, we could have done that. We could have simply allowed that amendment to stick in the bill, and then this would have been trade compliant.…”