Still fuming over how the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was handled in reconciliation and how rescissions clawed back congressionally approved spending, Democrats say Republicans have irrevocably damaged the traditionally bipartisan coalition that passes the farm bill.
“I’m sorry, this idea that we could just forget about what they just did. No, what they did is awful,” Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern, who sits on the House Agriculture Committee, recently told NOTUS. “I mean, millions of people are going to be hurt. So, you know, people can do whatever they want. I’m just speaking for myself. But I don’t want to deal with them until they fix the damage they did in reconciliation.”
Republicans cut an estimated $187 billion from SNAP over the next decade, which is about a 20% cut from a program that provides food benefits to about 40 million Americans. And instead of addressing SNAP through a farm bill, Republicans excluded Democrats from the process by using reconciliation.
Those cuts would have been a nonstarter for Democrats, with GOP leaders generally counting on Democrats to supply a substantial portion of the votes to pass the farm bill. And the lack of a new farm bill — the 5-year-old, 2018 law has been extended twice instead of being replaced with new legislation — is a sore spot for just about every Agriculture Committee member in both chambers.
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House Agriculture Committee Chair Glenn Thompson has taken to referring to the reconciliation law as “Farm Bill 1.0.” With that major hurdle now dealt with, he’s been optimistic about a pared-down, skinny “Farm Bill 2.0” this fall.
The focus is now on bipartisan priorities, and there will theoretically be “no basis for partisanship with what we’re going to have” later this year, Thompson previously told NOTUS.
But Democrats on the Agriculture Committee disagree, telling NOTUS that how the GOP went about muscling through SNAP cuts on a partisan basis was designed to shut them out of the process on SNAP, and fundamentally damaged trust, putting the farm bill and its traditionally bipartisan coalition on the line.
“When Republicans went after food programs by devastating access to food across the country through axing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, I would argue that Republicans have jeopardized the passage of a farm bill,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján told NOTUS. “I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but things don’t happen accidentally. It’s very, very concerning. All of this work should have been done in the farm bill.”
Democratic Sen. Tina Smith offered similar thoughts about her GOP counterparts.
“Completely rejecting any bipartisan process and reconciliation and making unilateral decisions around the nutrition program as well as other farm bill programs, makes it that much harder to figure out the farm bill,” Smith said.
This year has been freshman Rep. Shomari Figures’ first farm bill process. He told NOTUS that the sentiment among members who have been around for longer is that reconciliation has “certainly dampened the mood” and “it certainly seems that it really threw a wrench into the idea of being able to work in a bipartisan fashion.”
Figures cast some blame for the partisan tensions on President Donald Trump and his administration.
“I think it’s a product of the White House, right? I think they do exactly what the president says,” he said. “I think the president does not, the administration, nor does this Congress at this point, appear to really care or have any interest in serving the average, everyday American.”
But ultimately, most Democrats NOTUS spoke to, while clearly frustrated about how their colleagues had gone about SNAP cuts, were conciliatory about eventually coming to the bargaining table.
“I’m always going to try to do what’s right for Minnesota producers. And there’s lots of important policies that were left undone in reconciliation,” Smith said, despite her displeasure about how the GOP had handled SNAP. “It’s hard, but you got to keep on trying to figure out a path forward. And I do always try to find a way, especially for those small producers in Minnesota.”
Freshman Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet, who also serves on the Agriculture Committee, told NOTUS that “people in our districts expect us to come here and get to work, and that means that we’ve got to get a farm bill across the finish line.”
“That doesn’t mean that we blindly say ‘yes’ to everything that the majority wants to do,” McDonald Rivet continued. “There are things we can negotiate over and we should negotiate over, but we need to make sure that we are doing our jobs, making sure that the pieces of the farm bill that haven’t been reauthorized in years get across the finish line.”
Thompson met with ranking member Rep. Angie Craig in July and told NOTUS that the meeting was friendly.
“I think we’re dedicated to really looking at a strong, bipartisan Farm Bill 2.0,” Thompson said.
He said there were no “red lines” that became apparent in that meeting, and “the conversation was forward-looking.” Despite the warnings from Democrats throughout reconciliation that forcing SNAP cuts through could risk the farm bill, Thompson said he didn’t think it “jeopardized anything.”
But McGovern, a longtime SNAP advocate, told NOTUS that Thompson has “fucked over millions and millions and millions of vulnerable people in this country.”
“You know, we have to fix that, so we can’t have business as usual,” he said.
Craig, who is running for the Senate seat in Minnesota that Smith is vacating, said she had been hoping to see 100 to 150 Democrats supporting the farm bill in a “truly bipartisan process.” But she noted that is a much more difficult task now.
She said the reconciliation bill and the rescission package had resulted in a “lack of trust” of Republicans.
“I’ve said from the start that unless it was a truly bipartisan process, it was going to be really tough to get the majority of Democrats to support that,” Craig said.
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