HOT SPRINGS - Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Cotton of Arkansas on Wednesday called for food stamp funding to be taken out of a farm bill he opposed last month, saying he wouldn’t reconsider his vote on the measure without this “essential reform.”
The freshman lawmaker was the only House member from Arkansas to vote against the five-year bill when it came up for a vote last month. He said that isolating the portion of the bill that deals with food stamps would allow lawmakers to consider that issue separately from agricultural funding matters.
“Dividing it is one essential reform we need so we can have real reform to the food-stamp program and then focus the farm bill where it should be legitimately focused, which is on farm policy,” Cotton said, after holding a coffee-with-your-congressman event with constituents. “We’re still in the preliminary discussions about that in the Congress, but that’s one very basic reform that needs to happen.”
Cotton is widely viewed as a potential challenger to Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor next year and has faced criticism from Democrats and farm advocates for his vote last month. Cotton represents a rural district stretched across southern and western Arkansas.
The bill would have authorized $940 billion in spending over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a reduction of $33 billion over the next decade compared with projected spending levels if current farm policies were kept intact.
Most of the cuts, about $20 billion over 10 years, would have come from the food stamp programs, which account for about 78 percent of the farm bill’s spending. Last year, the program paid out $80.4 billion.
Cotton joined 61 other Republicans in voting against the measure.
Cotton said the measure didn’t do enough to cut costs in the food-stamp program.
“There’s a lot of fraud in it, there’s a lot of waste in it, there’s a lot of disincentives for getting people off food stamp rolls and back to work that really have nothing to do with farm policy,” Cotton said. “We should be considering bills that focus on discrete, particular issues so we can make the best policy on those issues as opposed to legislative logrolling.”
Two Democratic political action committees are running a television ad criticizing Cotton, who hasn’t said whether he’ll run against Pryor.
Information for this article was provided by Alex Daniels of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Arkansas, Pages 12 on 07/05/2013