Kudos to the Congressional membership on both sides of the aisle for finally adopting the long-awaited H.R. 2419, the Farm, Nutrition, and Bioenergy Act of 2007, better known as the Farm Bill. And for over-riding the as-promised veto from President Bush.
After all, it took enough time. Work on the legislation began almost a year ago now.
Just take a look at the title of the bill and note the date.
But, in the wake of what could have been a final and successful establishment of these much-needed programs — some two-thirds of which address nutritional programs, including food stamps for low-income families — the issue once again turned political.
It seems, in the process of printing the final bill to send to the president for his Nero-ish thumbs-up or thumbs-down, some 34 pages addressing food assistance and trade with troubled foreign countries were somehow omitted. The bill Dubya vetoed and sent back to Congress turned out to be slightly different from the one passed by the House and Senate.
Questions arose over how this could happen, what it meant for the future of the legislation and where things would go from here.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., quickly fell on her sword, taking responsibility for the error. But we doubt she was running the copy machine when 34 of the almost 800 pages of the bill somehow disappeared.
Scrambling to save the legislation, members of the Senate and House quickly found a precedent for keeping the bill. But they had to go back to 1892 to find it and discover their plan to address the missing pages was, indeed, constitutional.
The House quickly adopted the legislation again — this time, with the missing pages back where they belonged — by a second, overwhelming margin, more than enough to shortstop another White House veto. The Senate postponed a similar action until next month, after they get back from vacation.
Meanwhile, the White House and legislative Republicans were quick to begin sniping at the Dems, calling them incompetent, among other counter-productive invectives. One word out of the White House claimed this was a chance for Congress to start over and get the bill “right” this time.
The bottom line is, this was a simple clerical error. Shame on the Republican leadership for attempting to make political hay from an issue that should have been settled months ago.
And shame for their attempt at pouring rhetorical gasoline on a fire that never should have been lit in the first place.
— Andrew D. Brosig for The Girard Press