Angie Craig: “I think I and a lot of other Senators are very frustrated at this moment as we have tried to move this issue over the…”

“I think I and a lot of other Senators are very frustrated at this moment as we have tried to move this issue over the last several weeks. All of us agree that the agricultural community deserves to hear a clear message from the Congress of the United States that relates to farm policy. I am terribly disappointed that this afternoon we could not gain cloture, that the other side chose to kill freedom to farm. We also put up an excellent alternative to that and that--we could not work with that issue. Obviously, farm policy in its formation has always been bipartisan. I was confident this afternoon, or at least I thought I could be, that we had worked for several days to build that bipartisan compromise and still maintain the kind of levels of expenditure that sent a clear message to American agriculture that there would be some safety nets but, at the same time, that they were going to move toward the market as they have told us--week after week, month after month, as we have held hearings in the Senate Agriculture Committee this year--that a reinstatement of current policy simply would not work anymore and it should not work. While I know none of us at this moment are working on a reinstatement of current policy, I am very concerned to see us edging back toward it at a time when agriculture has said to us that is not where we ought to head. So I hope we can arrive at something over the weekend and into next week.”