Food, Conservation, and Energy Security Act of 2008--Veto Message from the President of the United States

FOOD, CONSERVATION, AND ENERGY SECURITY ACT OF 2008--VETO MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (H. DOC. NO. 110-115) -- (House of Representatives - May 21, 2008)

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Mr. PETERSON of Minnesota. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

I ask my colleagues to listen up here because this has been a very difficult bill and there has been numerous problems that have developed every day for the last year-and-a-half. I guess it's appropriate that there would be a problem that would be developing today as well.

When the enrolling clerk enrolled the bill to send to the White House, somehow or another they inadvertently, or however it happened, did not include the trade title, title III of the bill, in the official documents that went to the White House. So the President vetoed the bill minus the trade title, title III.

The trade title includes the food aid programs, including McGovern-Dole; it includes the market promotion; the export credit program; the market access program, and it also includes the soft wood lumber certification program.

So we are moving ahead to override the veto that the President has done. But we have this issue that one of the titles is missing from the bill. We have a process after we get through the override to try to deal with that issue.

Mr. Speaker, the President's veto message said that when the commodity prices are high, it's irresponsible to increase government subsidy rates for 15 crops and subsidize additional crops and so forth. We made some adjustments in some of the price supports to try to rebalance the system from what it has been in the past. These were modest, and I think it's questionable that you would use this as one of the items in the veto override.

As I have worked through this process, I spent more time than anybody else talking to the White House, trying to avoid the situation we are in today, where the President has vetoed this bill. I don't know that anybody else has spent more time trying to work with the White House. The problem has been that they keep changing the objections to the bill, and 2 or 3 weeks ago, when we tried to engage the White House to be able to work with them in a negotiating fashion to take into consideration some of their concerns, their position was that, well, they had these demands but they really weren't in a position or willing to negotiate with us.

So we have come to this day where the White House has vetoed this bill,

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which I regret. But we have a good bill that I think all of us should be proud of. It maintains a safety net for farmers, by and large, in the way it was done in the 2002 bill. We did make some changes; reductions in crop insurance and some other areas. We included a new disaster program that is paid for, that would be an unusual situation because generally the disaster ad hocs that we have done have not been paid for. So we think we have made some improvements in area.

We responded to the concern of people around the country of food costs and the way food prices have gone up by taking all of the new money, the whole $10 billion of new money that was put into the bill over and above the baseline and we have put that into nutrition programs. $10.364 billion in this bill was put into nutrition programs. That includes modernizing and indexing food stamps; $1.25 billion for food shelves and food banks that are basically bare right now; and also a new fruit and vegetable snack program for folks in low-income schools so that our kids can have healthy snacks and have an alternative to some of the things that they are now snacking on. We also made some changes, as I said, in the commodity area so that we could improve substantially conservation. We have added a specialty crop title to this bill, and we have also added an energy title to this bill.

So we have responded to what we heard when we traveled the country under the leadership of then-Chairman GOODLATTE. We have responded to all of the areas. We think we have a bill that is responsible, that is paid for without tax increases, that puts the priorities where they need to be in this country.

I would ask my colleagues to follow up on the good vote that we had last Wednesday on the bill when it was on the floor and give us the majority today to override the President's veto.

With that, I would reserve the balance of my time.

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