IN COMMITTEE, MARCH 4
The House Agriculture Committee took up H.R. 7567, the Farm, Food and National Security Act of 2026 — the five-year reauthorization of every major farm and food program in the country.
It passed the committee 34 to 17. Seven Democrats voted for it.
Alabama has two members on that committee. Barry Moore voted yes. Shomari Figures voted no.
That is not our characterization. It is the Alabama Farmers Federation's, written up on their own website the next day.
ON THE FLOOR, MAY
The full House passed the farm bill in May. Three hundred and ninety billion dollars. Five years of certainty for people whose entire business is planning against weather and price.
Every Republican in Alabama's delegation voted for it.
Shomari Figures voted against it.
Twice, then. Once where the bill was written, once where it was passed. The most consequential piece of agricultural law this district will see in five years, and the Wiregrass's own congressman was not among those who voted for it.
HIS REASON, IN HIS OWN WORDS
We are going to state his reason accurately, because it is a real one and pretending otherwise would be a favor to him.
He said the bill failed to restore one hundred eighty-seven billion dollars in SNAP funding cut by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and that it did not do enough for farmers facing inflation and tariffs.
Food assistance matters in this district. Nobody on this page is going to pretend that families in Wilcox County and Lowndes County do not depend on it, or that a man who fights for it is acting from a bad motive.
But notice what the choice actually was.
The farm bill was going to pass. It passed. His no vote did not restore a single dollar of SNAP and did not stop a single page of the bill. What it did was ensure that when the commodity title, the crop insurance title and the credit title for the next five years came up for a vote, the representative of Alabama's most agricultural district was recorded against them.
He weighed the nutrition title above the farm title and voted accordingly. That is a defensible position for a congressman from Brooklyn. It is a strange one for a congressman from the Wiregrass.
WHAT HE DID DO, AND WE WILL SAY IT FIRST
He is not idle on agriculture and we are not going to claim he is.
An amendment of his passed the committee by voice vote — strengthening land-grant universities' ability to teach heirs' property education and succession planning. In the Black Belt, where clouded title has taken more Black-owned farmland than any drought ever did, that is genuinely useful work and it deserves saying.
In July he introduced the Tariff Impacted Farmer Support Act, fifteen billion dollars through the Commodity Credit Corporation for small and mid-sized family farms growing cotton, peanuts, soybeans, corn and poultry. The Alabama Contract Poultry Growers Association endorsed it. That is a real bill addressing a real problem.
He also introduced a package called Rural Futures — SNAP protections, rural health centers, veterinary education at the 1890 land-grant schools.
INTRODUCING IS NOT PASSING
Here is the difference, and every farmer in this district already understands it.
A bill that is introduced is a press release with a number on it. Most legislation dies the day it is filed and never moves again. The Tariff Impacted Farmer Support Act has not become law. Rural Futures has not become law.
The farm bill became law.
One of those things sets the crop insurance rules that a peanut grower in Coffee County will farm under until 2031. The other is a document.
A member of the minority can introduce anything he likes. What he cannot do is introduce his way out of a recorded vote against the only agriculture bill that passed.
SIXTY-EIGHT DAYS
Rhett Marques has spent twenty-six years running a tire and automotive shop in Enterprise, in the middle of that farm economy, selling to the people who work it.
He was not in the room in March or in May. He did not have a vote to cast.
But District 2 gets to decide, on November 3, which man it wants in the room the next time the farm bill comes up.
Wall of Shame — Today: Bradley Arant
Today on the Wall of Shame: the Bradley Arant Boult Cummings PAC (Birmingham) has put $2,500 into Rep. Shomari Figures' campaign account. One of Alabama’s largest law and lobbying firms — an access play. The Wall of Shame exists for one reason — so that total stops growing. https://take2back.com/wall-of-shame.html
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