Key Vote NO on the New House Farm Bill

As one of our millions of FreedomWorks members nationwide, I urge you to contact your representative and urge him or her to vote NO on new House Farm Bill, H.R. 2642.

House Leadership does deserve some slight praise for bringing forth a Farm Bill that is separate from the food stamp provisions that have served for decades as a mammoth earmark to attract Democratic support for the bill. However, splitting the food stamps and farm bill is a means to reform, not an end in itself.

Unfortunately, House Republicans appear to be trying to advance a Farm Bill that not only contains no major reforms to crop insurance or industry subsidies, it is actually somewhat worse than the policies in the Democrat-led Senate Farm Bill.  The House bill actually spends more than its Senate companion, while still containing the brand new shallow loss crop insurance entitlement, which is guaranteed to spend billions per year more than the CBO estimates.

Worse, this bill doubles down on bad policy by locking in all of its corporate welfare and overly generous subsidies into permanent law, by getting rid of the provision that requires the bill to be reauthorized every five years. 

Once again, the whole point of splitting up the Farm Bill was to break up the unholy alliance between urban Democrats and rural Republicans that ensures that the bill passes every five years without significant reform.

House Leadership is trying to pass this bill off as a great reform and a major concession to conservatives.  Instead, they are ensuring that fiscal conservatives may never be able to make any significant reforms to this terrible bill ever again.

I urge you to call your representative and ask him or her to vote NO on the new Farm Bill. We may count their vote as a KEY VOTE when calculating the FreedomWorks Economic Freedom Scorecard for 2013. The Scorecard is used to determine eligibility for the FreedomFighter Award, which recognizes Members of Congress with voting records that support economic freedom.

Sincerely,

Matt Kibbe
President and CEO
FreedomWorks