This op-ed by Barry Piatt appeared on the South Dakota Searchlight on January 22, 2024.
The new five-year federal farm program, which was due on the president’s desk no later than September 30, 2023, is missing.
Republicans who run the U.S. House of Representatives don’t have a good answer about why it is missing.
In fact, the explanation for what happened to it is little more than a reworking of the age old “the dog ate my homework” excuse used to “explain” missing arithmetic homework assignments by school kids for years.
As for the kids, I don’t know. I suppose it is possible that every now and then a family’s floppy-eared pup may have actually eaten the homework. But in this case — The Case of the Missing Farm Bill — don’t blame Fido.
The truth is, a new five-year Farm Bill was not enacted before it expired on Sept. 30, 2023, for one simple reason: Congress didn’t get around to it. It was too busy — particularly in the House — with “more pressing” matters.
Specifically, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives was way too busy chasing partisan and ideological windmills, and fighting amongst themselves to find time to actually do their jobs.
Here are some things Republicans who control the House did have time to do last year:
- Fight innumerable, never-ending intramural political fights with each other.
- Vote 15 times over multiple days to finally elect Kevin McCarthy, R-CA), speaker of the House.
- Fire McCarthy after less than a year as House speaker, after which they promptly left for a one-week vacation. McCarthy’s great transgression: accepting Democratic help and votes to pass legislation to avoid a government shutdown.
- Nominate four other Republicans to become speaker of the House over the course of three weeks.
- Elect Mike Johnson, R-LA, speaker of the House, making the author of many of the partisan talking points — aka lies — about the Jan. 6 insurrection, second in the line of presidential succession. It took the House three weeks to complete the process of nominating and actually electing a new speaker, and Johnson was apparently the best they could produce. Which tells us a lot about the current state of the Republican Party in general, and the House Republican Conference, in particular.
- Engineer two near-miss government shut downs and set the stage for a third potential government shutdown on January 20, 2024. (Congress passed a stopgap spending bill Thursday to avert a shutdown.)
- Launch an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden for crimes no Republican in Congress can identify.
- Endlessly harass the president’s only surviving son.
- Endlessly promote Donald Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election and lies about the Jan. 6 insurrection.
What Republicans did, instead of completing government appropriations bills on time, was pass a last-minute “continuing resolution” for funding the government, including the Farm Bill.
That “CR,” as they call it on Capitol Hill, simply extends the deadline before appropriations expire. Federal programs continue with no changes in funding levels over the extension period, and with no change in substance, no matter how much circumstances may have changed since the last budget was enacted.
In the case of the five-year Farm Bill, which was last enacted in 2018, the CR extends the federal farm program not by five years, but by just one year, to September 30, 2024. That’s an additional year for farm programs to run on the fumes of policies set in 2018, with funding at current levels.
It is, in essence, simply giving Congress an additional year to “get its stuff together” and actually write a new federal farm program. Which is what they were supposed to have completed, but didn’t.
Iowa Republican Rep. Zach Nunn, who represents the 3rd District, had the most interesting — no, make that the most laughable — press release announcing this congressional failure.
He not only announced the failure as a great victory, he claimed in a press release that he himself — Zach Nunn — had secured passage for it. Apparently on his own: “Nunn Secures Passage of Critical Agricultural Programs for Iowans,” read his immodest headline.
He never got around to mentioning that this action was only needed because Congress failed to complete its work on a new five-year Farm Bill by September 30. And the only mention he made of any role he had in “securing” this “up is down” and “black is white” great victory was to say that he voted for it.
Here’s where it really gets rich: Nunn also quoted himself saying “… producers are facing enough difficulties without worrying about D.C. hurting their business. They deserve far better than to be saddled with the consequences of politicians not doing their job.”
Yes, he actually said that in a written press release.
Well, they do deserve better, but they also deserve better than to be told that by a politician — Zack Nunn, a politician — who, along with his other Republican politician colleagues in the House let the 2018 Farm Bill expire without enacting a new one on time.
That was a lot of damage control for one press release. It was also ham-handed at best. I doubt if many in Iowa’s farming communities were fooled by his hollow, self-serving braggadocio.
Nunn is a member of the House Agriculture Committee, by the way. So he was kind of one of the first in line of those politicians who did not do their job by letting the 2018 Farm Bill expire without a replacement ready. Just sayin’.
Leaving the work undone that Congress was supposed to do on behalf of family farmers and rural communities has real consequences. Multiyear financing, planting, and marketing decisions, and a host of other decisions depend, to one degree or another, on knowing what the federal farm program is going to be over the next few years. That’s why Farm Bills are written in five-year chunks.
The ability to make planning decisions, knowing what the five-year federal farm program includes, now hangs in limbo.
In 2022, Republican congressional campaigns in Iowa and other farm states, talked a lot about the importance of farming, family farmers, and a new five year Farm Bill.
Once elected, however, they failed to deliver. Big time. They knew the expiration date of the old Farm Bill five years out. Yet they missed the deadline for writing a new one, and when all is said and done, it looks like they may be turning it in as much as a year past that deadline.
Their job was to write and enact a new five-year Farm Bill. They promised to do so.
They failed to do it, and failed family farmers and rural communities in the process.
Not one of Iowa’s congressional Republicans ran for Congress pledging to let the Farm Bill expire without replacing it with a new, up-to-date one.
Yet that’s what each of them delivered.
They need to know we noticed. And that we find their individual and collective failures unacceptable. Otherwise this sort of debacle becomes accepted, standard operating procedure.
The Republican inability — utter incompetence is a better description — to govern has real impact. Failing to complete government-wide appropriations by the end of the fiscal year affects all Americans, but family farmers are getting a front row seat to witness this disfunction up close and personal with the failure to enact a five-year Farm Bill and the uncertainty that comes with that.
This chaos is no accident. It is the inevitable result of voting for and electing people to Congress who are incapable of governing, but worst yet, have no real interest in governing, so strong is the lure of partisan, political gamesmanship and the thirst for power without knowing what to constructively do with that power once obtained.
The farm vote in Iowa and other rural states is pretty predictably Republican. It probably will stay that way until family farmers and rural communities grow tired of getting a whole lot of nothing from their elected Republicans in Congress.
Until then?
That flapping sound you hear across farm country as rural Iowans await an overdue, new five-year Farm Bill?
That is the sound of chickens coming home to roost.