• ABERDEEN -- Congress squandered an incredible opportunity to enhance American agriculture while saving taxpayers billions of dollars when lawmakers failed to pass a comprehensive, long-term farm bill last year. That's according to former South Dakota Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin who spoke Friday evening at the South Dakota Farmers Union's 98th annual state convention at Aberdeen.
• "The reason we didn't get a multi-year farm bill in the last Congress, five words: John Boehner and Eric Cantor, bottom line," Herseth Sandlin said, referring to Speaker of the House Boehner and House Majority Leader Cantor. "And it's because they're ideologically opposed to many of the programs that are in that bill. The Senate comes up with a product that saves $23

billion in taxpayer money, passes a bipartisan bill, the House Ag Committee passes a bill and John Boehner won't bring it for a vote."
• "John Boehner had a responsibility as Speaker of the House to bring that bill, whether it was the committee bill or the Senate bill to the floor of the United States House of Representatives to make amendments in order and to let members influence that bill and pass the bill to the benefit of not just everyone in this room and everyone in agriculture but for the entire country that has been supported and sustained by the agriculture sector," she said.
• Herseth Sandlin, a Democrat who served in the U.S. House from 2004-2011, said she gets asked a lot whether she misses being in Congress. She said she misses the opportunity to serve, but said "the answer is a lot more complicated than that" because of the extreme partisan divide she says has engulfed the nation's capital.
• "What's going on in Washington has gotten to the point where unfortunately the public can't expect much out of their Congress as an institution given the raw partisan politics that seems to trump any type of common ground that should be advancing smarter public policy," she said. "As I watched the last Congress unfold, recalling

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