A bill to amend Public Law 110-196 to provide for a temporary extension of programs authorized by the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 beyond April 25, 2008.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 2903 introduced earlier today by myself.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to modify the bill at the desk to insert the date May 9, 2008, in both paragraph 1 and paragraph 2, in lieu of May 2.

Mr. President, I say to my colleague from Idaho that in 1996 when that farm bill came up, it was 6 months late. It was signed into law April 4, 6 months past due. I do not recall the Senator from Idaho raising any objections. He was here at that time. And that was an easy farm bill. This is a very tough one. It is tough because there are tax measures that have come into it--not of my doing, not of the doing of my ranking member. But the Finance Committee and others got involved in this, so we have tax measures that have been a long, drawn-out process. This has sort of been out of our jurisdiction.

Senator Chambliss and I have been dogged in getting the work done on the Agriculture bill, and we have. I say to my friend from Idaho, if this were only the Agriculture bill, we would have had this done a long time ago. This has to do with tax measures. As such, neither Senator Chambliss nor I have control of that; we are not chairman or ranking member of the Finance Committee or Ways and Means.

I say to my friend from Idaho, so they were 6 months overdue in 1996. So we are over 6 months overdue right now. We are very close to getting this agreement done. We worked today, worked yesterday, and things are coming together. We made real progress. It has been slow, but it has been real. We have reached a number of agreements, and we are very close to putting this together.

Why would we want a 2-week extension? The House is not even in tomorrow, for one thing. Then we have to finish this. We have to go back into full conference. There are some items that are going to require a little bit of debate and some votes. Even if we were to finish this bill by next Wednesday, which I think is possible, it is going to take another week just to do the paperwork and get everything together. It is humanly impossible--humanly impossible--legislatively impossible to get everything done in 1 week. That is why I asked for 2 weeks, because that is realistic. It is unrealistic, at this point in time, on Thursday, to say we can get everything done by next Thursday. It is just impossible. I want to be realistic.

I do not want to play any games around here. Frankly, we could finish our work, we can get the stuff done, but we can't get it all nailed down, the paperwork done, all that stuff that has to be done to clean up everything to get it to this body and get it to the House for a vote by next week--legislatively impossible.

I say to my friend from Idaho, you can either be realistic or unrealistic, you can help us out and be supportive of a process that has taken a lot of time and effort by both Senator Chambliss and me, by Republicans and Democrats. We have been working very hard on this, and we are very close to getting it done. To put on just a 1-week extension is just unrealistic.

I yield to my friend from Idaho.

We just have a disagreement on this issue. I guess, due to the objection--I guess we will be back here probably again next week asking for another extension.

Mr. President, I wish to echo a little bit what my friend from Georgia just said. I will say in all candor to my friend from Idaho that his action last week had an effect. I will be very frank about that. It did not go unnoticed in our deliberations. Frankly, I think it caused us to do a lot of things in the last week. So I give that to my friend from Idaho.

I guess the only reason I was a little upset, I think sometimes when we try to do some things that are unrealistic--I think the specter of what you said last week was pretty realistic, and that caused us to do some things. I guess my only problem with this is that I think everyone recognizes that even though we are very close, we can get this done before next week, it cannot get done legislatively, the paperwork. Sometimes if you hold something out that is unrealistic, people tend to pooh-pooh it and say: Oh well, we will get another extension and we can dribble along. But if you know the curtain is coming down, then things happen. That is why I asked for 2 weeks. People know that is realistic. We have to get it done. It has to be done. But if it is 1 week, then, well, we will come back next week, and hopefully we can get whatever extension is necessary to get the paperwork done and everything.

I want to say again, Senator Chambliss and I--all of us on the Agriculture Committee worked very hard. The groundwork was laid when Senator Chambliss was chairman of the committee. When it changed hands after the last election and I was privileged to take over as chairman, we worked together. We passed a great farm bill in the Senate, something I was very proud of, and I think Senator Chambliss--all of us were. We passed a farm bill with 79 votes.

Now, a lot of times people around the country--you hear them say: Can't you people quit your bickering and get things done? Well, I thought we did that on the farm bill. You can't get much better than 79 votes. That is the most votes the farm bill has ever had on the Senate floor. So Republicans, Democrats, East, West, North, South--different regions all were supporting it. So you would think the administration might have said: Well, gee, with that, maybe we ought to work with them and get it done. But we got a veto threat right away.

So, again, I thought we had a good product here when we passed it in the Senate. But, understanding that the House did not have the same views as we did, we had to go to conference. But I can say this again, that I hope in another farm bill that will come up 5 years from now, this is not going to happen again, that this is not going to happen again with the Finance Committee and the Ways and Means Committee basically controlling our agenda. They are good people. I do not want to cast aspersions on any committee or anything like that. But they have their agenda, they have what they want to do.

The Agriculture Committee did its work. As Senator Chambliss said, if it had been just our bill, the Agriculture bill, we would have been done with this a long time ago. Our differences, whatever they are, are minor. We had basic agreements on different parameters and things such as that. So we had a good bill, and we have made good progress.

The other thing I wanted to say as long as I have the floor is that the President is not doing us any favors by the White House issuing the statement that we should have a 1-year extension. For some of the reasons that I think the Senator from Idaho pointed out, prices going up and things like that, people expect us to do something. And one of the big parts of this whole farm

bill--in fact, the biggest part of this farm bill is nutrition. Over 60 percent of this farm bill is nutrition; it is food stamps, it is the TEFAP program, the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program, WIC, it is all of these programs that help low-income people put food on their table. Yet we know, with the increasing prices of food, people are hurting, low-income people are hurting in this country.

Well, with a 1-year extension, we give no relief at all to low-income families. In this bill, what we have agreed upon so far is roughly about $10 billion more--not base--$10 billion more in nutrition programs. Now, if we have a 1-year extension, that is gone. So I think we have an obligation here to help people who are low-income, who maybe had a job and lost it, who need to go on food stamps for a short period of time to be able to help their families. Well, if we have an extension, that will not happen.

Energy. We hear a lot of talk--I think it is misguided--about some of the food going for ethanol and that is causing a lot of problems. That is not it at all. That is not it at all. A lot of people have the mistaken idea that the corn that is being made into ethanol is the corn people eat. That is not so. People do not eat that. It is not the kind of corn you buy and you eat on your plate at night. This is the corn which is fed to chickens and cows and hogs. Most of the hungry people in the world are not hungry because they are not getting meat; they are hungry because of subsistence diets. So the ethanol thing is kind of a bugaboo; that is a phony issue out there. But we recognize the limits, and we recognized that in the Energy bill we passed where we mandated a renewable fuels standard, but we said that, of that, no more than 15 billion gallons a year from present sources, corn. So therefore we want to move aggressively into cellulosic ethanol, using wood products and waste products and things such as those for making ethanol. This bill pushes us in that direction, moves us aggressively in that direction. Well, if we have a 1-year extension, we will lose yet another year or two on that.

Lastly, let me mention conservation. Millions and millions of acres are coming out to be used for crop production. You cannot stop it. These are contracts that farmers had to set aside land. The contracts are up. Because of the high prices of wheat and corn and beans and other commodities, farmers now see they can make money by planting row crops. That is fine. That is good. That will help keep the prices of food down. We need that productive capacity.

That is what was so good about the Conservation Reserve Program. It was like a reservoir, that if we needed it at some time, we could use it. Well, now is the time. We are going to use it. And more crops will be planted on this land. But some of these lands are fragile, they are hilly, they are highly erodable. So therefore we need to put some incentives in there for farmers to do it right, to put in grass waterways, to put in buffer strips, to do minimum tillage, to do all that is necessary to conserve our soil and clean up our water. We can have production, and we can have good conservation. This bill puts a lot more money into the very conservation programs that will allow farmers to go out and plant and grow and yet be good conservationists. Yet, if we have a 1-year extension, we do not have that.

So for that and for a lot of other reasons, I wish the White House would quit talking about that and say: Look, you have a good bill. You have done a lot of work. We will work with you. We will get this bill done, and the President will sign it into law. That is the kind of cooperation we need from the White House right now and not the veiled threats of a year extension, things like that.

I think the Senator from Idaho is right, we have been so locked up in meetings on this that perhaps Senators and their staffs and others have not really been brought up to speed on what we are doing. I want to take this opportunity to bring them up to speed as to where we are in all of these negotiations.

We are very close. We are meeting right now again at 10:30 and will proceed on today, tomorrow, through the weekend if necessary to get this done.

I ask unanimous consent that the bill be read three times and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate, and any statements related to the bill be printed in the Record.

Let me say by way of reporting where we are on this bill to all of our colleagues that we have 13 titles on the farm bill. We have now closed six of those titles. I think by the end of the day there is the opportunity for us to close at least a couple more of those titles, maybe even more. Despite the fact that the House is going out today and we are still going to be here, the principals involved in this from the conference standpoint as well as staff are going to continue to work through this all through the weekend, as all of our staff have done for all of these 6 months. Staff has been unbelievable, trying to wade through this.

But here is our practical problem. We have never had this problem with the farm bill. This is the third one I have been involved in as a Member of Congress--I have also been participating in several others-- and I have never seen this situation before; that is, we had to go to the Finance Committee and Ways and Means Committee to ask them for some spending savings and some revenue measures to allow us to write a farm bill that is truly a meaningful safety net for our farmers and ranchers.

But just as important, because 66 percent of the funding in this farm bill is going to our nutrition programs--our food stamps, our school lunches, our food banks, all of which are so integrally important and all of which are within the jurisdiction of the Agriculture Committee-- we have had to look to Ways and Means to finance like we never had to before.

Second, the Senate had a tax package that is $7 billion on our bill that did not appear in the House bill. We had a lot of disagreement, a lot of argument about that. But as of last night, I think we made some real progress. As I have already told my friend from Idaho, I think his coming to the floor last week and trying to tighten the screw and saying he would object to another extension has had an impact on that, and I am not unappreciative of the efforts of Senator Craig.

But here we are today on the very verge, I think, based upon a meeting Senator Harkin and I were in this morning. As soon as we leave here, we go back into another meeting. We are going to stay there until we get some of these key issues resolved. We are now getting to the point where, I think, within a short term--I hope it is Monday, I hope it is no later than that--it may be, but I hope we can come back in and stand on this floor and say that we have reached an accord and that we are going to be writing that bill over the course of the next 10 days, 2 weeks, whatever it may be that it takes to physically get the job done from the committee paper standpoint. But we are very close. And I think there is an opportunity to get this done. It is not going to be done, completed, in the next week, but I have no problem with a 1-week extension because I do think it will keep the pressure on. It will require us to ultimately get something done.

Another factor in here is the White House. The White House has to be involved because the President has to sign whatever product we send to him.

Another problem is, if it were up to Senator Harkin and me, we would have had this bill done long ago. We had the shortest session in the Senate Agriculture Committee when we reported this bill out of the committee under your leadership. We got it done in a day and a half. We went into conference, and we appointed our conferees fairly quickly. It took the House almost 6 months to appoint their conferees. We have 11 conferees, the House has 49 conferees, all of whom have to be available to be in 1 room at the same time and all of whom had the opportunity to discuss their particular part of this bill. It has been a nightmare from that standpoint, but we are getting closer.

I appreciate the Senator from Idaho being reasonable with us as far as us getting a 1-week extension, and I would implore that we move forward with it, send it to the House, and hopefully get this concluded.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, reserving the right to object.

Mr. President, I am inclined to object. This is no reflection at all on the chairman of the Agriculture Committee and the ranking member. We are now 6 months into working on a new farm bill. In 2 weeks, we will probably start grain harvest in the panhandle of Texas. Last week, I came to the floor in a sense of frustration and urgency for American agriculture, for the Congress to complete its work. I am told by the chairman and the ranking member that a great deal has been accomplished this week and a sense of urgency is beginning to build. I would be willing to extend current farm policy for another week while the principals work on the finalization of a new farm bill because their work product is a good one. I am not here to destroy it. I am here to say, on behalf of American agriculture, they are sensing urgency--it is time Congress senses urgency. Six months negotiating a bill in most people's minds is about long enough.

So for a full 2-week extension, I will object. I object.

Will the Chairman yield?

In everything I say, it is not a reflection on the work of the Senate, it is a reflection of reality, and 1996 doesn't have anything to do with it. This is 2008, and agriculture today is considerably different than it was in 1996.

Today on the news you are actually hearing some supermarkets talk about the shortage of a food supply. I don't know if we have ever talked food supply shortages--ever in my lifetime--for American consumers.

If what the Chairman tells me is accurate, and I have no reason to doubt him--and Senator Chambliss has done a wonderful job of keeping me and our colleagues informed--but collectively you have told this Senate more in the last 10 minutes than we have heard in a month from the collective principals on where we are with the progress. If by next week you have completed your work and we are simply ready to ink it and get it into a final package--I told Senator Chambliss I wouldn't be on the floor today if that had happened this week. But it has not happened.

You have made progress. What is wrong, Mr. Chairman, with coming back here at the end of next week, reporting your work product and saying: Give us another extension and we will put it in final. That is a report to American agriculture, the kind they now deserve, more than they did 6 months ago. This is the fourth extension you have asked for, and I am simply saying I will give you one more,

but you said it--the House is going out tomorrow. Is that a sense of urgency, that they are not staying here and working and completing the work? Give them 2 weeks and they will go out another 3 days.

America's farming community senses urgency at this moment. I hope we do. I know you do, and I know the ranking member did. In no way is this a criticism of your work product and your work effort. You have done a marvelous job. But I think it is time collectively Congress get their work finished.

I thank the Senator for yielding.

Mr. President, no objection, but this was the original at the desk, not the one amended by the Chair?

I thank the Chair.

Mr. Chairman, let me thank you for that report. I do not know if there is anyone here in ag country who does not want your work product to become policy as soon as possible.

I think the colloquy this morning has been extremely valuable. Please go back to work.

Madam Speaker, reserving the right to object, I rise in support of the temporary farm bill extension. It will extend the provisions of the 2002 farm bill an additional week to give our committee more time to finish the farm bill.

We continue to work towards an agreement on this very complex piece of legislation. While there is a significant amount of work that has been accomplished, there is more that remains to be done. And the House and Senate conferees have been meeting this week and continue to meet. The staff has worked diligently to bring this bill together.

The farm bill is a critical piece of legislation for this country. It's the commodity title, it's the social attrition problems, conservation, rural development and a variety of other things. It is something that must be accomplished and we on the Agriculture Committee, Congressman Holden and myself, take very seriously as we work in that direction.

I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Madam Speaker, I withdraw my reservation of objection.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to take from the Speaker's table the Senate bill (S. 2903) to amend Public Law 110-196 to provide for a temporary extension of programs authorized by the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 beyond April 25, 2008, and ask for its immediate consideration in the House.

Madam Speaker, will the gentleman yield?

Madam Speaker, I agree with my friend from Oklahoma. This legislation is desperately needed in rural America and in agriculture country. The conferees are making progress, but Chairman Peterson and Ranking Member Goodlatte are not on the floor right now because they are in meetings with the Ways and Means

Committee and the Senate Finance Committee as progress is being made. But we need this one additional week to iron out the differences with the other body, and I urge the adoption of the bill.