Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., said today she has secured a commitment from the Obama administration to find $1.5 billion in its budget to help farmers who are coping with natural disasters.
Lincoln, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, won a fight last week to include $1.5 billion in agricultural disaster assistance in a bill to aid small businesses, but Republican senators voted to block the bill.
The Hill newspaper reported that Republicans indicated today they might drop a filibuster of the small-business bill if Democrats agreed to remove agricultural disaster assistance from the measure.
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel then called Lincoln and pledged to provide the $1.5 billion administratively in exchange for deleting disaster assistance from the bill, the newspaper reported.
