Saxby Chambliss: “I just want to say, like my other colleagues, how much I appreciate the strong leadership, both to the chairman of the…”

“I just want to say, like my other colleagues, how much I appreciate the strong leadership, both to the chairman of the committee and also to the ranking member. The gentleman from Texas (Mr. Combest) and the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Stenholm) have come together in a strong bipartisan way to ensure that farmers in America have been treated fairly. Also to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Ewing), my subcommittee chairman, and the gentleman from California (Mr. Condit), the ranking member. Again, we have shown how things in this body ought to work in a bipartisan way. Agriculture is the backbone of the economy of this country. It always has been and, frankly, always will be. But today agriculture all across the United States is in trouble. We are taking some short-term measures to shore up the current deficit in prices for commodities across the country, and that is very well needed. But even though we have heard a lot of fingerpointing in the last 4 years now, almost since we passed the 1996 farm bill, as to what the cause of the problems are in agriculture country today, when we passed the 1996 farm bill, there were several legs to the table that were going to be necessary to require agriculture country to stabilize for years to come. One of those legs was regulatory relief. Frankly, in this House, we passed any number of regulatory relief measures that would give our farmers more flexibility to operate their farms and improve their bottom line.”