Page 81 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

The ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, Collin Peterson of Minnesota, was
furious with Cantor. He says he had supported the bill because Lucas assured him the SNAP cut
wouldn’t be increased. Peterson insists to this day that at least 50 Democrats were ready to
vote for the bill before Southerland’s amendment was adopted.

Heritage and other conservative groups that had been agitating to slash both farm and nutrition
spending seized on the chance to split the urban-rural coalition once and for all.

“Now is the time for the House to recognize what so many others have: The unholy alliance
that has long dominated America’s agriculture and nutrition policy must end,” said
Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America.

Lucas and the House GOP leadership saw only one option short of trying to win over Democrats:
split nutrition programs from the farm bill and increase the cuts. “We wanted separation, and we
got it,” said Rep. Marlin Stutzman, a hardline conservative from Indiana and Farm Bureau
member who rejected the idea that farm and nutrition programs should be enacted together.

Lucas says the drive to split the bill was driven both by “my idealistic friends here in D.C.,”
who thought that it would produce greater budget savings, and by “people in this town who
wanted to kill the farm bill.

“By splitting them up you’d kill both pieces and not have a farm bill,” Lucas said.
In July, Cantor stripped the nutrition title from the bill and put the rest of the legislation on the
House floor, despite united opposition from more than 500 farm groups and other organizations.
The opponents included the American Farm Bureau Federation, which had seldom bucked
congressional Republicans.

The House approved the SNAP-less farm bill, 216-208, over protests from Democrats. And then
in September, Republicans forced through, 217-210, a nutrition-only bill that proposed to slash
nearly $40 billion from SNAP over 10 years, a cut
twice the size of the reduction in the bill that the
House rejected in June. No Democrat voted for
either bill. “Has our moral compass fallen so
low?” asked House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer,
D-Md.

But the conservative strategy ultimately failed.
The House’s cuts to SNAP were a non-starter in
the Senate, a point that Agriculture Chairwoman
Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., had been making
clear for months. During the final negotiations on
the bill, which culminated in January 2014, the cut
to SNAP was reduced to $8 billion, close to what
was envisioned in the original 2011 super-
committee process, by raising states’ minimum
“heat-and-eat” payment to $20 a month.
Senator Debbie Stabenow

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