(Spirit Lake)—A member of Iowa’s congressional delegation is holding out optimism that congress will pass a farm bill once it reconvenes following its summer break. Congressman Steve King tells KUOO news he feels there’s a very real possibility of that happening…(click here for comment.) “We brought it through committee again this year, took it to the floor for a vote, it failed. That would indicate the leadership vote count the year before was probably prettty close to right. I thought that we could go back to the drawing board and get those votes out of the middle, go to the Democrats and ask them what’s it going to take to pick up another couple dozen votes out of your side. I’ve talked with Colin Peterson who had that conversation. I’m convinced we could have done that. Regardless our leadership decided to split the bill, peeling off the 80 percent that goes toward nutrition. We passed the agriculture component of it, the 20 percent that roughly remains in there. That bill is out there now and we have to deal with the nutrition before we can move forward.”
And when it comes to that aspect of the measure, King says progress has been made…(click here for comment.) “I’ve been sitting in on planning meetings on nutrition, I chair that subcommittee, by the way, for the last several weeks. And now we have a plan and a strategy that hopefully we’ll be able to bring a nutrition bill to the floor in September. That will get us to the point hopefully to where we can conference. It’s going to be hard though, to have a conference committee reach a conclusion and pass a bill that gets to the President’s desk by September 30th when this extension expires, but it’s not unusual for the farm bill to expire and I think we do get something this fall. We’re moving in the right direction and we’ve got to get it done in a non-election year.”
King made his comments to KUOO news during a stop earlier this week in Spirit Lake.
