U.S. Congressional News - Michigan - onPolitix

Obama OKs honor for Birmingham bombing victims

2013-05-24T21:20:13Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama signed legislation Friday to award Congress' highest civilian honor to four girls killed in an Alabama church bombing during the civil rights movement. He called it a tragic loss that "helped to trigger triumph and a more just and equal and fair America."

The Congressional Gold Medal will go to Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair.

Addie Mae, Carole and Cynthia, all 14, and Denise, 11, were killed when a bomb planted by white supremacists exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on Sept. 15, 1963. Twenty-two others were injured.

Denise's mother and sister, and Carole's sister were among those who stood around Obama's desk in the Oval Office as he signed the bill.

"For us to be able to be in this Oval Office with so many people who have worked hard to make this day possible, and understanding that that tragic loss, that heartbreak helped to trigger triumph and a more just and equal and fair America, that's an incredible thing for us to be able to participate in," he said.

September will mark the 50th anniversary of the bombing, which helped spur passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Three Ku Klux Klan members were convicted of the bombing years after the attack. Two are dead and one is in prison.

While Congress widely embraced awarding the medal, the idea has divided the victims' relatives.

Some are supportive while others say they would prefer financial compensation and have little interest in the award.

Sisters of Denise and Carole sat in the House gallery during the debate and vote on the measure. Relatives of Addie Mae and Cynthia, also known as Cynthia Morris, have said they aren't interested in a medal. Addie Mae's sister lost an eye in the bombing.

Also present for the bill-signing was Attorney General Eric Holder and his wife, Sharon Malone. Her late sister, Vivian Malone Jones, was one of the first black students to enroll at the University of Alabama in 1963 in defiance of racial segregation.

Reps. Terri Sewell, a Democrat, and Spencer Bachus, a Republican, led the Alabama congressional delegation's efforts to honor the bombing victims. They represent adjoining Birmingham districts in Congress.

Past recipients of the Congressional Gold Medal include George Washington, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., and his wife Coretta Scott King.

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Associated Press writer Henry C. Jackson contributed to this report.

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Follow Darlene Superville on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap

Obama balances threats against Americans' rights

2013-05-24T07:40:18Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — Forecasting the changing nature of threats against the U.S. for years to come, President Barack Obama says "America is at a crossroads." And so, too, is his presidency's counterterrorism policy, which has long struggled to balance protecting the nation from terror attacks while upholding Americans' rights.

The Obama administration this week acknowledged that four Americans have been killed — three of whom were not specifically targeted — in secretive overseas drone strikes against al-Qaida extremists since 2009. And in a wide-ranging speech Thursday, Obama warned that Americans must be vigilant against increasing homegrown threats from within, including from fellow citizens like the surviving suspect in last month's Boston Marathon bombing.

It is an awkward position for the president, a constitutional lawyer, who took office pledging to undo policies that infringed on Americans' civil liberties and hurt the U.S. image around the world.

Instead, he defended on Thursday his continued and expanded use of the spy drones, which have killed thousands of terror suspects and civilians, in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. He hinted in the speech that he would give law enforcement officials new authority to seize suspicious communications within the United States.

And Obama defiantly promised to push forward with his longtime goal of closing the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where 166 terror suspects are being held — but said it's largely up to a resistant Congress to get it done.

Obama acknowledged it's a tough line to walk in striking a balance.

"Now is the time to ask ourselves hard questions — about the nature of today's threats and how we should confront them," Obama told his audience of students, national security and human rights experts and counterterror officials at the National Defense University.

"In the years to come, we will have to keep working hard to strike the appropriate balance between our need for security and preserving those freedoms that make us who we are," he said.

The president outlined a narrower scope of threats against the United States in the years ahead, with the war in Afghanistan winding down and an al-Qaida that has splintered — in part, due to the very attacks he authorized. But as al-Qaida has fragmented, it has given rise to smaller networks and homegrown extremists that pose increased risks to Americans, he said.

Some Republicans criticized Obama as underestimating the strength of al-Qaida and objected to his plans to try to repeal broad executive powers to use military force against the nation's enemies. Congress granted those powers to George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"I believe we are still in a long, drawn-out conflict with al-Qaida," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a leading voice among Republicans, told reporters after the speech. "To somehow argue that al-Qaida is on the run comes from a degree of unreality that to me is really incredible. Al-Qaida is expanding all over the Middle East, from Mali to Yemen and all places in between."

Obama's address came amid increased pressure from Congress on both the drone program and the status of the Guantanamo Bay prison. A rare bipartisan coalition of lawmakers has pressed for more openness and more oversight of the secretive targeted drone strikes, while liberal lawmakers have pointed to a hunger strike at Guantanamo in pressing Obama to renew his stalled efforts to close the Navy detention center.

The president cast the drone program as legal, effective and necessary as terror threats progress. But he acknowledged that the targeted strikes are no "cure-all" and said he is haunted by the civilians unintentionally killed.

In Pakistan alone, up to 3,336 people have been killed by the unmanned aircraft since 2003, according to a New America Foundation database of the strikes. However, the secrecy surrounding the drone program makes it impossible for the public to know for sure how many people have been killed in in strikes, and of those, how many were intended targets.

The Justice Department revealed Wednesday that four Americans had been killed in U.S. drone strikes abroad. Just one was an intended target — Anwar al-Awlaki, who officials say had ties to at least three attacks planned or carried out on U.S. soil. The other three Americans, including al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, were unintended victims.

"How good, really, is our system for targeting and reducing unintended casualties?" said Elizabeth Goitein, an attorney and co-director of the Brennan Center Justice's Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University law school. "These three American citizens were not targeted, and their deaths were collateral damage."

She added: "The talk about being more transparent and preserving our liberties is talk. It's rhetoric."

In newly public White House guidelines governing when to launch drones, the U.S. will not strike if a suspect can be captured, and attacks may only target an "imminent" threat. Though the White House prefers greater military responsibility for drones, the CIA will play a continued role with strikes in Yemen and control the program in Pakistan.

The president said he was open to additional measures to further regulate the drone program, including creating a special court system to regulate strikes. Congress is already considering whether to set up a court to decide when drones overseas can target U.S. citizens linked to al-Qaida.

In seeking to close Guantanamo, Obama faces many of the same roadblocks that stymied his efforts to shutter the prison when he first took office. Many Republican lawmakers oppose Obama's efforts to bring some of the detainees to the U.S. to face trial.

But a new hunger strike by prisoners protesting their conditions and indefinite confinement has refocused Obama on efforts to close the detention center. He announced a fresh push Thursday to transfer approved detainees to their home countries and lift a ban on transfers to Yemen.

The end of the Yemen restrictions is key, given that 30 of the 56 prisoners eligible for transfer are Yemeni. Obama halted all transfers to the poor Middle Eastern nation in 2010 after a man trained in Yemen was convicted in a failed bombing attempt of an airliner bound for Detroit.

McCain pledged to urge his colleagues to work with Obama to shut the facility, but Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said Thursday's speech did not convince him.

"This speech was only necessary due to a deeply inconsistent counterterrorism policy, one that maintains it is more humane to kill a terrorist with a drone than detain and interrogate him at Guantanamo Bay," McKeon said.

Closer to home, Obama also warned of "the daunting challenge of terrorism from within our borders." He said law enforcement authorities would be reviewed, "so we can intercept new types of communication and build in privacy protections to prevent abuse." He did not provide specifics.

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Associated Press writers Lolita C. Baldor, Kimberly Dozier and Richard Lardner contributed to this report.

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Follow Lara Jakes and Julie Pace on Twitter: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP and https://twitter.com/jpaceDC

House committee passes Iran sanctions legislation

2013-05-23T12:01:48Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new push to thwart Iran's nuclear ambitions by crippling the country's economy is gathering momentum on Capitol Hill.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee approved legislation Wednesday that would impose even tougher economic sanctions against Tehran. The bill seeks to further curb Iran's oil exports, limit Tehran's access to overseas foreign currency reserves, and expand the list of blacklisted Iranian companies.

The U.S. and other world powers fear Iran's production and stockpiling of uranium enrichment is aimed at developing a nuclear weapon. Iran insists its work is for peaceful purposes.

Congress has slapped penalties on Iran four times since June 2010.

The committee's Nuclear Iran Prevention Act seeks to close any loopholes in existing sanctions and increase the pressure on Iran's leaders to give up their nuclear program.

Immigration bill heads to full Senate

2013-05-23T11:46:08Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — A far-reaching bill to remake the nation's immigration system is headed to the full Senate, where tough battles are brewing on gay marriage, border security and other contentious issues, with the outcome impossible to predict.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the measure 13-5 Tuesday night, setting up an epic showdown on the Senate floor after Congress' Memorial Day recess. The legislation is one of President Barack Obama's top domestic priorities — yet it also gives the Republican Party a chance to recast itself as more appealing to minorities.

Many involved still vividly recall the last time the Senate took up a major immigration bill, in 2007, beginning with high hopes only to see their efforts collapse on the Senate floor amid a public backlash and interest group defections.

Some expressed optimism for a better outcome this time around as the Judiciary Committee gave its bipartisan approval. Three Republicans — Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Jeff Flake of Arizona, both authors of the bill, and Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah — joined the 10 committee Democrats in supporting the measure.

"We've demonstrated to the United States Senate we can all work together, Republicans and Democrats," said the panel's chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. "Now let's go out of this room and work together with the other members of the Senate, and with the other body (the House), and more importantly work with all Americans, and all those who wish to be Americans."

In a statement, Obama applauded the committee's action and said the bill was "largely consistent with the principles of common-sense reform I have proposed and meets the challenge of fixing our broken immigration system."

The legislation would create new routes for people to come legally to the U.S. to work at all skill levels, tighten border security and workplace enforcement, and offer a chance at citizenship to the 11 million people here illegally.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has said he would bring the legislation to the Senate floor early next month for a debate that some aides predicted could consume a month or more. The fate of immigration legislation in the House was even less clear, although it was due to receive a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.

It was Leahy's 11th-hour decision to hold back on an amendment to extend immigration rights to same-sex married couples that cleared the way for the bill's approval.

Until Leahy began speaking on the issue to a hushed hearing room Tuesday evening, it wasn't clear how the matter, which had hovered over the three weeks of committee sessions to review the legislation, would play out.

Leahy had been under pressure from gay groups to offer the amendment, which would allow gay married Americans to sponsor their foreign-born spouses for green cards like straight married Americans can. But Republican supporters of the bill warned that including such a measure would cost their support. As the committee neared the end of its work, officials said Leahy had been informed that both the White House and Senate Democrats hoped he would not risk the destruction of months of painstaking work by putting the issue to a vote.

"I don't want to be the senator who asks people to choose between the love of their life and the love of their country," Leahy said, adding that he wanted to hear from others on the committee.

In response, he heard a chorus of pleas from the bill's supporters not to force a vote that they warned would lead to the collapse of Republican support and the bill's demise.

"I don't want to blow this bill apart," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the first to speak up.

"I believe in my heart of hearts that what you're doing is the right and just thing," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "But I believe this is the wrong moment, that this is the wrong bill."

Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Al Franken, D-Minn., added their voices, and Leahy announced that, "with a heavy heart," he would withdraw his amendment.

Gay rights groups voiced outrage, and the issue is certain to re-emerge when the full Senate debates the legislation. But it is doubtful that sponsors can command the 60 votes that will be needed to make it part of the legislation.

In the hours leading to a final vote, the panel also agreed to a last-minute compromise covering an increase in the visa program for high-tech workers, a deal that brought Hatch over to the ranks of supporters.

Under the bill, the number of highly skilled workers admitted to the country would increase greatly, but there were also protections aimed at ensuring U.S. workers get the first shot at jobs, and high-tech companies objected to some of those.

Under the deal, companies in which foreign labor accounts for at least 15 percent of the skilled workforce would be subjected to tighter conditions than businesses less dependent on H-1B visa holders, and requirements on recruiting and hiring and firing of U.S. workers would be relaxed.

In defeat, opponents said they, too, wanted to overhaul immigration law, but not the way that drafters of the legislation had done.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, recalled that he had voted to give "amnesty" to those in the country illegally in 1986, the last time Congress passed major immigration legislation. He said that bill, like the current one, promised to crack down on illegal immigration, but said it had failed to do so.

"No one disputes that this bill is legalization first, enforcement later. And that's just unacceptable to me and to the American people," he said.

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AP White House Correspondent Julie Pace contributed to this report.

Pentagon wants $450M for Guantanamo prison

2013-05-23T11:45:09Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Pentagon is asking Congress for more than $450 million for maintaining and upgrading the Guantanamo Bay prison that President Barack Obama wants to close.

New details on the administration's budget request emerged on Tuesday and underscored the contradiction of the president waging a political fight to shutter the facility while the military calculates the financial requirements to keep the installation operating.

The budget request for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 calls for $79 million for detention operations, the same as the current year, and $20.5 million for the office of military commissions, an increase over the current amount of $12.6 million. The request also includes $40 million for a fiber optic cable and $99 million for operation and maintenance.

The Pentagon also wants $200 million for military construction to upgrade temporary facilities. That work could take eight to 10 years as the military has to transport workers to the island, rely on limited housing and fly in building material.

The facility at the U.S. naval base in Cuba currently holds 166 prisoners, and hunger strikes by 100 of them over their indefinite detention and prison conditions prompted Obama to renew his effort to close Guantanamo. The president is expected to discuss the future of the facility in a speech on counterterrorism on Thursday.

"Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe," the president said at a White House news conference last month. "It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counterterrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed."

Since his inauguration in January 2009, Obama has pushed for shutting the prison, signing an executive order for closure during his first week in office. He has faced resistance in Congress with Republicans and some Democrats repeatedly blocking efforts to transfer terror suspects to the United States.

The law that Congress passed and Obama signed in March to keep the government running includes a longstanding provision that prohibits any money for the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States or its territories. It also bars spending to overhaul any U.S. facility in the U.S. to house detainees.

That makes it essentially illegal for the government to transfer the men it wants to continue holding, including five who were charged before a military tribunal with orchestrating the Sept. 11 attacks.

Lawmakers have cited statistics on terror suspects striking again and argued that Obama has failed to produce a viable alternative to Guantanamo.

Some members of Congress counter that U.S. maximum security prisons currently hold convicted terrorists and can handle such suspects. Among those in U.S. prisons is Zacarias Moussaoui, who planned the Sept. 11 attacks.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., said he favors closing Guantanamo for several reasons, including the expense. Money in a time of deficits could be a factor for other lawmakers, including fiscal conservatives in Congress.

Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Obama on Tuesday offering his help to get the facility closed.

Until it is, Smith wrote, "it will continue to symbolize an unjust attempt to avoid the rule of law and to undermine the United States' moral standing in defending its values and protecting human rights."

Smith said al-Qaida continues to use Guantanamo to rally violent extremists to its cause.

Obama voices support for Senate immigration bill

2013-05-23T11:31:16Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says a far-reaching immigration overhaul approved by a Senate panel is largely consistent with his own principles.

He says the bill meets the challenge of fixing a broken U.S. immigration system.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved the bill in a 13-5 vote after the panel's chairman agreed not to force a vote on his proposal to allow gay Americans to seek green cards for their spouses.

Obama says he hopes the bill will still be improved. He's applauding the bipartisan Senate group that crafted the bill, which creates a path to citizenship for millions living in the country illegally.

Obama is urging the full Senate to take up the bill soon. Debate on the bill is expected to start early next month.

Obama defends drone strikes but says no cure-all

2013-05-23T11:00:55Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama on Thursday defended America's controversial drone attacks as legal, effective and a necessary linchpin in an evolving U.S. counterterrorism policy. But he acknowledged the targeted strikes are no "cure-all" and said he is haunted by the civilians unintentionally killed.

The president also announced a renewed push to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, including lifting a moratorium on prisoner transfers to Yemen. However, shutting the prison will still require help from Republicans reluctant to back Obama's call to move some detainees to U.S. prisons and try them in civilian courts.

Obama framed his address as an attempt to redefine the nature and scope of terror threats facing the U.S., noting the weakening of al-Qaida and the impending end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

"Neither I, nor any president, can promise the total defeat of terror," Obama said in remarks at the National Defense University. "What we can do — what we must do — is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend."

Since taking office, Obama's counterterrorism strategy has increasingly relied on the use of strikes by unmanned spy drones, particularly in Pakistan and Yemen. The highly secretive program has faced criticism from congressional lawmakers who have questioned its scope and legality.

The president, in his most expansive public discussion on drones, defended their targeted killings as both effective and legal. He acknowledged the civilian deaths that sometimes result — a consequence that has angered many of the countries where the U.S. seeks to combat extremism — and said he grapples with that trade-off.

"For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live," he said. Before any strike, he said, "there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set."

Ahead of the address, Obama signed new "presidential policy guidelines" aimed at illustrating more clearly to Congress and the public the standards the U.S. applies before carrying out drone attacks. Officials said the guidelines include not using strikes when the targeted people can be captured, either by the U.S. or a foreign government, relying on drones only when the target poses an "imminent" threat and establishing a preference for giving the military control of the drone program.

However, the CIA is still expected to maintain control of the drone program in Yemen, as well as in Pakistan's tribal areas, given the concern that al-Qaida may return in greater numbers as U.S. troops draw down in Afghanistan. The military and the CIA currently work side by side in Yemen, with the CIA flying its drones over the northern region out of a covert base in Saudi Arabia, and the military flying its unmanned aerial vehicles from Djibouti.

In Pakistan alone, up to 3,336 people have been killed by the unmanned aircraft since 2003, according to the New America Foundation which maintains a database of the strikes.

Obama's advisers said the new guidelines will effectively limit the number of drone strikes in terror zones and pointed to a future decline of attacks against extremists in Afghanistan as the war there winds down next year. But strikes elsewhere will continue. The guidelines will also apply to strikes against both foreigners and U.S. citizens abroad.

On the eve of the president's speech, the administration revealed for the first time that a fourth American citizen had been killed in secretive drone strikes abroad. The killings of three other Americans in counterterror operations since 2009 were widely known before a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy acknowledged the four deaths.

In that letter, Holder said only one of the U.S. citizens killed in counterterror operations beyond war zones — Anwar al-Awlaki, who had ties to at least three attacks planned or carried out on U.S. soil — was specifically targeted by American forces. He said the other three Americans were not targeted in the U.S. strikes.

Though Obama sought to give more transparency to the drone program, the strikes will largely remain highly secret for the public. Congress is already briefed on every strike that U.S. drones take outside Afghanistan and Iraq during the war there, Obama said, but those briefings are largely classified and held privately.

The president said he was open to additional measures to further regulate the drone program, including creating a special court system to regulate strikes, similar to one that signs off on government surveillance in espionage and terror cases. Congress is already considering whether to set up a court to decide when drones overseas can target U.S. citizens linked to al-Qaida.

White House officials said the president had originally planned to deliver Thursday's speech earlier this month, but it was delayed as the administration grappled with a trio of other controversies, including the attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, the IRS' targeting of conservative groups and government monitoring of reporters.

Also Thursday, Obama reaffirmed his stalled 2008 campaign promise to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where some terror suspects are held. Lifting the ban on transfers of some Guantanamo prisoners to Yemen is a key step in jumpstarting that process, given that 30 of the 56 prisoners eligible for transfer are Yemeni.

Obama halted all transfers to Yemen after the failed Christmas Day 2009 bombing attempt of an airliner over Detroit. The convicted bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, trained in Yemen.

Congress and the White House have sparred since Obama took office in 2009 over the fate of the suspects and whether they can be brought to trial on U.S. soil. In the meantime, the detainees have been held for years with diminishing hope that they will charged with crimes or given trials.

Obama acknowledged that the politics of closing Guantanamo are difficult, but he made the case that "history will cast harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism, and those who fail to end it."

Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he was open to a proposal from Obama on the future of Guantanamo Bay. But that plan has to consist of more than political talking points, he said.

This week, the Pentagon asked Congress for more than $450 million for maintaining and upgrading the Guantanamo prison. More than 100 of the prisoners have launched a hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention, and the military earlier this month was force-feeding 32 of them to keep them from starving to death.

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Associated Press writers Lita Baldor, Kimberly Dozier and Richard Lardner contributed to this report.

Lawmakers hand Myanmar leader prisoner list

2013-05-23T10:45:09Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers are asking Myanmar President Thein Sein (tane sane) to free nearly 250 political prisoners.

Thein Sein met Tuesday with members of the Senate and House on Capitol Hill, a day after he became the first Myanmar leader to visit the White House in five decades.

As Myanmar has shifted from military rule in the past two years, it has freed hundreds of political detainees but others are still held.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi and three other Democrats handed Thein Sein a prisoner list and called for an end to attacks on minorities.

President Barack Obama voiced strong support Monday for Thein Sein's leadership, but said violence against minority Muslims needs to stop.

Thein Sein also met with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to discuss political reform.

Senate panel nears final big immigration decisions

2013-05-23T10:13:16Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate Judiciary Committee hopes to nail down an elusive compromise on high-tech visas and may punt a controversy over gay marriage to the full Senate as it makes final decisions on immigration legislation giving a shot at citizenship to millions living in the country illegally.

At the same time, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are meeting with individuals who would be directly affected by the measure as they demonstrate support for a sweeping overhaul of the nation's immigration law.

The legislation would give an opportunity of U.S. citizenship to millions of immigrants now here illegally, create a new visa program for low-skilled workers and permit a sizeable increase in high-tech visas. It also requires new measures to crack down on future unlawful immigration.

Senate to debate crop insurance in farm bill

2013-05-23T10:13:01Z

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate is debating cuts to the federally subsidized crop insurance program as it considers a massive farm bill this week.

The Obama administration said Monday it wants to see more cuts to crop insurance and farm subsidies in the legislation, which would cost almost $100 billion a year over five years and would set policy for farm programs and food aid.

The bill would cut about $2.4 billion annually from overall farm spending. But it would still expand federally subsidized crop insurance and raise some subsidies for rice and peanut farmers. The White House did not specify how large a cut it was seeking.

Almost $80 billion of the annual cost of the bill is for domestic food aid, with most of the rest of the money split between farm subsidies, federal help for crop insurance and programs to protect environmentally sensitive land.

The government spent an estimated $15.8 billion on the program for the 2012 crop year after a drought destroyed many crops, up from $9.4 billion in 2011. The government subsidizes about 62 percent of farmers' insurance premiums and also subsidizes the insurance companies that sell the policies. The cost of the program has risen in recent years because of bad weather events and record-high crop prices.

The Senate began debating the bill Monday, with Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., saying she expected several amendments to be offered on the crop insurance program. Stabenow and other farm-state senators have argued that crop insurance should be maintained and even expanded because it protects farmers when they need it most and because farmers contribute some of their own money to the program.

Critics say federal contributions to crop insurance are too generous and subsidize big agricultural businesses.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., offered the first crop insurance amendment Monday, proposing an end to $33 million a year in insurance policies for tobacco farmers. A buyout for tobacco farmers enacted nine years ago is phasing out government payments to tobacco farmers, but many of them still receive crop insurance.

"It turns out Joe Camel's nose has been under the tent this whole time in terms of crop insurance subsidies," McCain said, referring to a character that used to appear on packs of Camel cigarettes.

Cuts to the food stamp program are also expected to be a contentious issue on the Senate floor.

The administration statement did not say whether President Barack Obama supports $400 million in annual cuts to the food stamp program contained in the Senate bill. The statement said it supports the food stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, but did not specifically mention the cuts.

The Obama administration has been stronger in opposing cuts to SNAP in the House farm bill, which are about five times as much as the cuts in the Senate bill.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Monday he was "deeply concerned" about the House food stamp cuts, which he said would "deny struggling families and their children access to food assistance."

Though Senate Democrats have generally opposed cutting food stamps, Stabenow included the small cuts in the Senate version of the bill to try to appease House Republicans who say the program is too expensive.

The legislation approved by the House Agriculture Committee last week would cut about $2.5 billion a year, or a little more than 3 percent, from SNAP, which is used by 1 in 7 Americans.

The House legislation would achieve the cuts partly by eliminating what is called categorical eligibility, or giving people automatic food stamp benefits when they sign up for certain other programs. It also would save dollars by targeting states that give people who don't have heating bills very small amounts of heating assistance so they can automatically qualify for higher food stamp benefits.

The Senate bill, also approved in committee last week, saves money in the food stamp program only by targeting the heating assistance dollars.

While calling for deeper cuts to subsidies, the White House also called for Congress to maintain the strong safety net farmers have now. Current farm programs expire Sept. 30.

"It is critical that the Congress pass legislation that provides certainty for rural America and includes needed reforms and savings," the White House said.

The Senate passed a similar bill last year, but the House did not consider it.