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Farm bill without food stamps criticized in media

While House Republicans were congratulating themselves on getting the farm-program-only farm bill through the House last week, the bill became the subject of criticism in newspapers, weekend TV talk shows and on farm radio programs.

On the PBS New Hour Friday, New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks said “The House Republicans are making it difficult for me to be a big cheerleader this week."

The proposals to reform the farm bill and split food stamps and the farm program “started with a decent impulse,” Brooks said, but ended with giving money to corporate farmers and “at least delaying money to poor people who need food.”

“So it’s a political disaster and it’s also a substantive disaster because they haven’t really changed the ag subsidies,” Brooks concluded.

On Fox News Sunday, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who heads the House Agriculture subcommittee in charge of nutrition, said that the Congressional Black Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus had mischaracterized the split as evidence that Republicans don’t care about food stamps and the poor. He said that the split-bill strategy has “politicized the farm bill for the first time in a long, long time” and that he preferred the joint bill because it included food stamp reform.

CBS News Face the Nation anchor Bob Schieffer said the farm program-only bill seems “almost like welfare for the wealthy, but you don’t include a dollar for hungry people for food stamps.”

Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., disagreed with Schieffer’s characterization, saying that “What bothers me is that one in six Americans right now are on this program.”

“Now, either the economy’s not growing at the rate it should, or this program is so badly flawed that we’re letting too many people in,” Kelley said. “The sustainability of this is what concerns me; you can’t keep promising things to people that in the future you know you can’t sustain. I think it's unfair, and I think it’s un-American to do that.”

Although Rep. Marlin Stutzman, R-Ind., proposed splitting the two programs, Kelly confirmed that it was House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., who made the decision after the comprehensive bill failed to “break it into two pieces” to bring up the farm program portion first.