Saxby Chambliss: “here we are, as Senator Harkin said, back again for one more vote on the farm bill. As I told my colleagues at lunch…”

“here we are, as Senator Harkin said, back again for one more vote on the farm bill. As I told my colleagues at lunch today, I wish I thought this would be the last one. We may have one more, if the President vetoes this bill. We may be back here again. But what a great opportunity it has been to work with Chairman Harkin and Senator Conrad, who is my dear friend. We became much closer friends during this process because we spent a lot more time together than we did with our spouses as we got through final negotiation. What great assets they have been for American agriculture. I appreciate my colleague from South Carolina and my colleague from Oklahoma. I told them to come down and talk about anything they wanted to. They talked about the same things we have talked about over the last three debates on this bill. Is this a perfect bill? It absolutely is not. Farm bills are always massive pieces of legislation. It is a 5-year bill. It spends $600 billion over 10 years. I had my staff check, though, and while I appreciate the comments of the Senator from South Carolina, the 2002 farm bill spent $800 billion over 10 years. So we are $200 billion below the 2002 farm bill on a 10-year basis. Again, it is not perfect. But what it does do is provide a school lunch program to needy kids as well as kids who can afford to pay. We are providing food stamps to people in this country who would go hungry otherwise.”