Collin Peterson

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Would the gentleman yield? We had an option to ACRE in the House bill that was different than the Senate. We had a national trigger, they had a State trigger. So it was in both bills.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Not this morning.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The bill before the House is identical to the provisions of the conference agreement on H.R. 2419 as adopted by the House and the Senate, with the exception of the added provisions to ensure, number one, that the legislative history associated with H.R. 2419 is carried forward; and, number two, that the two bills do not have simultaneous force and effect. Otherwise, by passing this bill, we are giving ourselves another opportunity to send to the President exactly what the House and the Senate have already passed by large bipartisan votes. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Reclaiming my time. This was done correctly. The 14 titles that were overridden yesterday were passed in an identical manner between the House and the Senate. They were vetoed by the President in that manner. The bill, once the Senate overrides, will become law. This is clarified in Field v. Clark in 1892, a similar situation. This is information that we knew before we proceeded, and we believe we proceeded correctly under the circumstances. Had we had unanimous consent, we wouldn't be here today. We would have had this resolved by now. I just would hope the gentleman would help us move past all of this and in good faith let us finally get this farm bill accomplished.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Again, one of the reasons that we were moving was because the extension of the current law expires Friday and we were trying to make sure we got the work done so that we could finally get this bill passed into law, after all the time that we have been working on this. If people think that I made the wrong decision here, I will take responsibility for it. But I talked to minority members. There were some on the other side that agreed with the process that we were setting forward. I apologize. There is nobody that has spent more time working on this bill. I personally looked over everything that has been in this bill. I guess the one mistake I made was that I didn't personally read the enrolled copy of this bill and actually check each page of it before it was sent to the White House. I guess I should have done that. A procedure was eliminated that used to be there under the Republicans. I think that procedure is now going to be reinstated after this experience. Really, this is just an error. And now we have to fix this. So what we are doing with this rule is allowing us to pass the whole bill again, send it over to the Senate. We are also going to pass a bill that just has title III in it, send that to the Senate, so that we give the Senate all of the options that they need so that we can get this expedited and fixed as soon as possible. That is what we are trying to do here. I apologize if some people's feelings were hurt, but we were doing the best we could.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. It is not a constitutional quagmire. I don't know why people bring this up, because it was clear in this 1892 court case what the situation is. The thing is, we initially asked, if I could explain, if it was possible to re-enroll the bill and send it back to the President in the way that it should have been done in the first place. We were told that could not be done. The problem that we have is not so much a problem in the House, but a problem in the Senate, that there is no way that you could get this bill redone without re-passing the bill.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I would yield the gentlewoman 1 additional minute.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to a good friend of the Agricultual Committee, Ms. Jackson-Lee of Texas.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I am now pleased to yield 1 minute to one of our new outstanding freshmen on the Agriculture Committee, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mahoney) who represents a very big agriculture district and has done outstanding work for us.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield 1 minute to the distinguished gentleman from North Dakota (Mr. Pomeroy) who is a member of both the Ways and Means Committee and Agriculture Committee, and did an outstanding job in helping us put this bill together.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I am now pleased to recognize an outstanding member of our conference committee, also a member of the Ag Committee, the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Scott).

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased now to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California, the chairman of the Horticulture and Organic Agriculture Subcommittee who brought us the first specialty crop title to the farm bill, Mr. Cardoza of California.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 1 minute to the distinguished chairman of the Department Operations, Oversight, Nutrition, and Forestry Subcommittee, who did such an outstanding job in putting the much needed nutrition title together, Mr. Baca from California.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the distinguished vice chairman of our committee and also the chairman of the Subcommittee on Conservation, Credit, Energy, and Research, Mr. Holden from Pennsylvania.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, a lot of people make a lot of claims about this bill. Editorial writers, most of them get the information wrong. But as has been mentioned here before, 15 percent of the bill goes to farmers; 9 percent of that goes to traditional commodity type programs; the balance of it to crop insurance and the new disaster program; 73\1/2\ percent of this bill goes to nutrition programs, while 7 percent goes to conservation. So you can talk all you want about the bull's-eye on the back of the farmers, but people need to understand that the European Union now is having discussion to get rid of their direct payments and increase their commodity price supports similar to what we have here in the United States. And there are people in this country that would like to do this as well. This ideology that's been pushed by the World Bank, the IMF, all of these other world organizations, is part of the reason we're in trouble in this country and in the world. We have, not just us but countries all over the world, have sold food below the cost of our production. Some of our opponents want us to keep doing this. I understand if you're a livestock farmer you want to keep buying cheap corn. But we've addicted these folks in these developing countries to cheap food prices. Now that we're getting prices that are more realistic, all of a sudden it's a problem because they didn't develop their own agriculture. They got hooked on exports from the United States and from other countries. What we're doing in this bill is recognizing all of the different aspects of this country, not just farm country, not just farmers, but people in the city, people in the suburbs, people that like to hunt and fish, people that are concerned about the environment, people that are concerned about getting nutritious food into our schools and having more fresh fruit and vegetables available for people around the country, and people that want to get independent from foreign oil. All of these things are covered in this bill. Are they done to the magnitude that I would like in some areas? No. I would say everybody here would probably agree that they would like to have something a little bit stronger in one area or the other or maybe a little weaker in one area or the other. But this is a compromise, a bipartisan compromise that I am proud of the way that we've been able to put together. Mr. Goodlatte and I sat in that room for many days with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle. We operated on an equal basis, as Mr. Goodlatte pointed out. There was give and take. This was a true bipartisan effort. We came up with a true bipartisan bill that we should be proud of that is good for America, that spends less than the last farm bill, that, as Mr. Goodlatte says, spends less than both bills that passed the House and the Senate. I can't remember a time around here when we've done something like that. So I encourage my colleagues to take a good look at this bill to understand that this is something that's good for the country. I urge my colleagues to override the veto of the President.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. I thank the gentleman. As I understand it, it was just a glitch in the printing of the document that went to the White House. They vetoed the bill missing title III and didn't recognize it. As I understand, the Constitution says that when we have a veto, we are bound to deal with it. So we don't see any other way to deal with this thing at this point other than to deal with the President's veto, have the override and then deal with title III later.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, for purposes of debate only, I yield 30 minutes to the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte) and further would yield 10 minutes of my time to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Kind) and ask unanimous consent that he may control that time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. I yield myself such time as I may consume. I ask my colleagues to listen up here because this has been a very difficult bill and there has been numerous problems that have developed every day for the last year-and-a-half. I guess it's appropriate that there would be a problem that would be developing today as well. When the enrolling clerk enrolled the bill to send to the White House, somehow or another they inadvertently, or however it happened, did not include the trade title, title III of the bill, in the official documents that went to the White House. So the President vetoed the bill minus the trade title, title III. The trade title includes the food aid programs, including McGovern- Dole; it includes the market promotion; the export credit program; the market access program, and it also includes the soft wood lumber certification program. So we are moving ahead to override the veto that the President has done. But we have this issue that one of the titles is missing from the bill. We have a process after we get through the override to try to deal with that issue. Mr. Speaker, the President's veto message said that when the commodity prices are high, it's irresponsible to increase government subsidy rates for 15 crops and subsidize additional crops and so forth. We made some adjustments in some of the price supports to try to rebalance the system from what it has been in the past. These were modest, and I think it's questionable that you would use this as one of the items in the veto override. As I have worked through this process, I spent more time than anybody else talking to the White House, trying to avoid the situation we are in today, where the President has vetoed this bill. I don't know that anybody else has spent more time trying to work with the White House. The problem has been that they keep changing the objections to the bill, and 2 or 3 weeks ago, when we tried to engage the White House to be able to work with them in a negotiating fashion to take into consideration some of their concerns, their position was that, well, they had these demands but they really weren't in a position or willing to negotiate with us. So we have come to this day where the White House has vetoed this bill, which I regret. But we have a good bill that I think all of us should be proud of. It maintains a safety net for farmers, by and large, in the way it was done in the 2002 bill. We did make some changes; reductions in crop insurance and some other areas. We included a new disaster program that is paid for, that would be an unusual situation because generally the disaster ad hocs that we have done have not been paid for. So we think we have made some improvements in area. We responded to the concern of people around the country of food costs and the way food prices have gone up by taking all of the new money, the whole $10 billion of new money that was put into the bill over and above the baseline and we have put that into nutrition programs. $10.364 billion in this bill was put into nutrition programs. That includes modernizing and indexing food stamps; $1.25 billion for food shelves and food banks that are basically bare right now; and also a new fruit and vegetable snack program for folks in low-income schools so that our kids can have healthy snacks and have an alternative to some of the things that they are now snacking on. We also made some changes, as I said, in the commodity area so that we could improve substantially conservation. We have added a specialty crop title to this bill, and we have also added an energy title to this bill. So we have responded to what we heard when we traveled the country under the leadership of then-Chairman Goodlatte. We have responded to all of the areas. We think we have a bill that is responsible, that is paid for without tax increases, that puts the priorities where they need to be in this country. I would ask my colleagues to follow up on the good vote that we had last Wednesday on the bill when it was on the floor and give us the majority today to override the President's veto. With that, I would reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the motions to suspend the rules relating to the following measures be considered as adopted in the form considered by the House on Monday, May 19, 2008: House Concurrent Resolution 300, Senate Joint Resolution 17, House Concurrent Resolution 325, House Resolution 1074, H.R. 3323, House Concurrent Resolution 334, House Resolution 1152, House Resolution 1132, House Resolution 1153, House Resolution 1026, H.R. 752, and H.R. 5787.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Would the gentleman yield?

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I call up the conference report on the bill (H.R. 2419) to provide for the continuation of agricultural programs through fiscal year 2012, and for other purposes.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota

Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks on the conference report to accompany H.R. 2419.