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Time apart doesn’t seem to have yielded any insights from Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts and ranking member Debbie Stabenow on how to get agreement on a bill to block Vermont’s GMO labeling law from taking effect July 1. And the lawmakers are blaming each other.
“We were negotiating before he made the decision to suddenly put forward something else before the Senate,” Stabenow (D-Mich.) told MA on [April 5], speaking of the bill that went to the floor in March. “So I’m hopeful that we can go back to negotiations.”
That bill, which would have stopped Vermont’s law and given the food industry two years to get widespread adoption of an electronic labeling system, failed to clear the 60-vote threshold needed on a procedural vote to get full consideration by the Senate. Only three farm-state Democrats — Sens. Joe Donnelly (Ind.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Tom Carper (Del.) — voted for the measure.
Roberts (R-Kan.) told reporters late [April 4] that he is still waiting for Stabenow to put forth any solid proposal to work with, adding that right up to the vote, “I kept hearing, ‘There is a compromise coming! There is a compromise coming,’” though no language ever appeared. If the bill that went to the floor is not good enough for Democrats, “I need legislative language on what they want to do because it never appeared,” he said.
Read full, original post: Impasse continues over GMO labeling bill
