Political Quotes

“I thank the Speaker. We agree that under normal circumstances a farm bill considered at this time ought to be scored on the March, 2008, baseline. But let me emphatically emphasize there has been nothing normal about the development of this farm bill. We're moving into our 17th month of intensive work on this farm bill. I'm telling you we have encountered every barrier you can possibly imagine, and we are almost done. We have almost got this to conference committee and to the floor. As the majority leader indicated, we are hopeful it will be on the floor next week. During the period of time we have been working on this bill, the House passed this farm bill July 27, 2007, and it took nearly 5 months in addition before the Senate passed its bill, December 14, 2007. If they would have gotten their bill done earlier, we probably could have concluded this. This wouldn't even have come up. We would have had the farm bill out of here by now. The Senate-passed bill, however, is 1,876 pages long; the House bill, 160 pages long. That alone will tell you we had an awful lot of work to reconcile these two bills. The Senate uses a different rule relative to determining baseline, a rule used by the House in the construction of the 1996 farm bill as well as the 2002 farm bill. This principle is pretty simple: If you have done most of the work on the legislation under the old baseline, you can conclude the work. It would undo everything to suddenly have the new scoring requirement.”