TO THE NASULGC FARM BILL CONFERENCE “WHIP TEAM”

 

If you are receiving this email, you are in a critical position to influence the final version of the 2008 Farm Bill...

 

Congratulations! You’ve made the “Whip Team” 

 

Professional staff from the House and Senate Agriculture Committees have started to meet to work out final language on various titles of the Farm Bill. The first staff conference on the Research Title occurred over the weekend and it is clear that staff and their chairmen or ranking republican members want to get Research out of the way quickly!

 

Attached to this email message are four key documents that will be of assistance as you contact those senators and/or representatives from your state who are likely to be on the conference committee:

 

1. An Excel spreadsheet based on the Research Titles in the House and Senate passed Farm Bills.

 

2. A Word document with brief explanatory notes for the Excel spreadsheet’s key provisions.

 

3. A Word document that shows the likely conferees and provides email/telephone links to their Farm Bill staff assistants.

 

4. A PDF document containing a letter from Michigan State University President Simon and accompanying discussion points on three key initiatives.

 

Here’s what we want you to do:

 

1. Use the Word document to make contact with your senators/representatives who are likely to be conferees.

 

2. Urge them to support the NASULGC position as detailed in the Excel spreadsheet and Word document. (Of particular importance are the items highlighted in red.)

 

3. Please send an email back to me letting me know whatever intelligence you may have gathered from each office. (This is very important.)

 

Some critical explanations about the spreadsheet:

 

Columnar information, based on House and Senate Farm Bill Research Titles:

▪ Column A shows the House section numbers/titles. (Listed sequentially.)

▪ Column B displays the corresponding Senate section numbers/titles.

▪ Column C is NASULGC’s conference priorities/positions (consistent with the direction BAA leadership has provided us and H.R. 2398, CREATE-21 legislation as introduced by Congressman Barrow) on all.

 

Conference positions shaded in red are conference priorities!  These were determined primarily because they deal with mandatory funding, or core policy goals that are not easily resolved in conference.

 

This is where the system’s advocacy efforts must be focused to gain success.

 

The conference recommendations in Column C use the following terms/conventions:

 

HR	House recedes to Senate position
SR	Senate recedes to House position
HWA or SWA	The respective body recedes to the other with a change in language from underlying provisions
Silent	Section/language is in both underlying bills and conference needs take no action.
No Position	Language or provision that NASULGC or its member institutions have no official position or stake in.

 

Where there are provisions that would obviously be supported by segments of the system that were not contained in H.R. 2398 we have provided appropriate recommendations.

 

We no longer use CREATE-21 (H.R. 2398) as comparison basis, because in conference the only scope is that between the House and Senate passed bills.

 

Follow-up:

 

You can expect to receive additional materials in the near future as the advocacy effort requires.

 

Happy New Year to everyone, thanks in advance for your efforts, and as always, don’t hesitate to call or email us if you have any questions. 

 

Thanks,

 

Jim

 

Jim Richards