Rep. Michael Conaway, R-Texas
House Agriculture General Commodities and Risk Management Subcommittee Chairman Michael Conaway, R-Texas, said today that that House negotiators will be flexible on all major issues in the bill including whether farm program payments should be based on planted acres or farmers’ historic base, nutrition and “even the dairy title.”

In a speech to the Farm Journal Forum, Conaway also said that he feels confident that the farm bill will be done by January if not before.

He also told reporters that if the bill is not passed before the Agriculture Department would have to start implementing the 1949 dairy law Congress would take short term action so that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack would not have to implement it.

The Republican leadership is “100 percent behind getting it done,” Conaway said, and has allocated floor time for consideration of the conference report.

He also said he believes the bill will have to be passed in the House with a combination of Democratic and Republican votes, but declined to say how many Republicans will vote for the bill. Conaway said he “would hate to be a farm state rural Democrat” candidate in 2014 who had “refused to do anything on food stamps” but said he could see how it would “make sense” for urban Democrats to “blow it [the farm bill] up” over nutrition issues.

He declined to talk about how tea party-oriented Republicans would vote, but said he did not believe the conference report would be passed with only Republican votes, as the farm program was last summer.

Conaway also stated a number of his personal positions, but said that he was not free to discuss negotiating trade offs and that his preferences should not be seen as predictions of the contents of the conference report.

He said he would like the bill finished in December, “but that may not be physically possible.” The important thing, he said, is to get “those big items across the finish line” and then deal with “nits and gnats.”

Talking to reporters, he said that one of those gnats is whether catfish inspection should be at the Agriculture Department or the Food and Drug Administration. The 2008 farm bill moved catfish inspection from FDA to USDA, but it has not been implemented and importers, trade advocates and Asian countries that produce catfish are urging Congress to repeal that law and leave inspection at FDA.

Conaway said the nutrition title could focus on “sound policy” because the Congressional Budget Office “does a good job guessing what the number would be” over 10 years, but that as soon as the bill is passed no one cares about it and in 10 years no one will ask if the bill really reduced spending by a certain amount.

He said he believes there should be work requirements for food stamp beneficiaries, particularly for people under 50 who are classified as able-bodied. He brought up the case of the California surfer who has been featured on television talking about how he gets food stamps while he tries to start a career in rock music.

Conaway said he is opposed to limits on crop insurance subsidies based on farmers’ adjusted gross income because insurance is a risk management tool and that big farmers would be punished simply because of size.

He also reiterated other statements that the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee are engaged in a rewrite of tax laws that make it difficult to predict farmers’ adjusted gross income levels in future years. Conaway called that case “a moral hazard.”

On the issue of providing food stamps because unemployment levels are high, Conaway said he is “way unsympathetic to that” because his father was a rig worker who moved the family frequently because it was important to have a job. He also noted that his own district may be the most prosperous in the nation and that there are plenty of jobs if people want to move there. Success in food stamps, Conaway said, should be “how quickly people get off them.”

Conaway also said he supports changes to the programs that allow the states to qualify people for higher benefit levels by making payments for heating and energy assistance and categorical eligibility, which allows states to determine poverty levels and asset tests.

He said it is unfair to have people in different states making the same amount of money and people in some states getting food stamps and others not. “I am not embarrassed about asking for that kind of reform,” he said.

On food aid, Conaway said he supports the current arrangement in which almost all food aid is purchased in the United States and shipped to needy countries. On the issue of giving countries cash to buy food aid closer to the need, Conaway said it is much easier to steal money than commodities.

On the energy and trade titles, he said, “there is not a lot of drama.”

Conaway ended his speech by, as he said, “preaching” that “only a moral people can self-govern.”

He urged the attendees to think when they sing “God Bless America” about what they are asking to be blessed, and asked whether they are blessing a coarsening of the concept of society or “the abortion industry that has killed 60 million babies in the last 40 years.”

Conaway said Americans have to “reclaim the high moral ground” and “sew the moral high ground back together” or the country can’t continue to self-govern.