Tom Harkin: “It is 8.8. So, again, I hope that Senators will see fit to at least endorse and vote for this package. The amendment…”

“It is 8.8. So, again, I hope that Senators will see fit to at least endorse and vote for this package. The amendment offered by Senator Cochran has no money for section 32 purchases, which I think is going to be very important for our pork and cattlemen, to buy up some of this excess stuff we have and put it into food banks, school lunch programs, and things such as that. I also must say there is no money in the Cochran amendment for price reporting. Quite frankly, I still think we have an obligation to do something about the unmet needs from the 1998 floods we had that so devastated North Dakota and some other parts of this country. Quite frankly, in this amendment, this compromise proposal that Senator Conrad and Senator Grassley have offered, there is money for that. So I think it does represent a true compromise. It represents a sort of meeting between where we started yesterday and where the manager of the bill started. Again, I think there are some provisions in there I wish we could have changed, but we had our votes and we were not on the winning side of that. So I think we can at least now have an agreement to get the amount of money out there, even though it is through the AMTA payments, that is needed and to provide some of the money for some of the areas that the Cochran amendment has omitted. I thank the managers, and I thank Senator Conrad for yielding me this time. I urge support of the amendment.”