Suppose for a moment Sen. Reid fails to get the 60 votes needed to cut off debate on the farm bill later this morning. (I've already supposed as much to Steve Hedges.) It means he takes down the bill, or debates mischievous amendments to it for weeks. Which might as well be forever given all the other things on his plate. [UPDATE: Cloture did fail. If a compressed farm bill debate, with limited amendments that will take no more than a few days, can't be agreed by both sides, forget a December result. The Senate will pick up the bill again in February, a reprise of the 2001/2002 farm bill cycle, and we won't see a completed bill until March, if not later.]

What does that mean? More negotiations about how to debate the farm bill and come back to it in December--or February? Sure.

Or maybe with time running out and no agreement in sight, a one- or two-year extension bill is proposed in the Senate? Yesterday Chairman Harkin speculated that might be the outcome. Reps. Goodlatte and Moran dropped an extension bill yesterday in the House.

So what would that mean?

Straight extension, in the Senate, means the entire Finance Committee package for the farm bill is kaput. The $5 billion "permanent trust fund" for disaster aid is gone. Those billions in quirky conservation tax credits? Poof! Those are the big items. They greased the passage of the Senate bill. Without them, passing this bill is going to cause some serious, uh. . .discomfort.

It means that added money for nutrition--$4 billion--is also gone. So is the $1 billion increase for fruit and veggie snacks in schools and the other monies the specialty crop lobby received, meager though they are relative to their original, multi-billion dollar ambitions. The revamped conservation title that marries CSP with EQIP and improves both, refills the WRP baseline and otherwise expands conservation spending? Hasta la vista, baby.

Increased loan rates for wheat and other crops? The increases were pitiful. Once again, wheat growers, in particular, are getting the chaff. Compared to specialty crops, wheat is the old pro at being grateful for farm bill crumbs and a belly scratch. But those increases, too, would be erased in an extension bill. Increased MILC price supports for dairy farms? That pail gets kicked over, too.

Average Crop Revenue? Say buh-bye, now; say buh-bye! Phony payment limit reform built around an adjusted gross income of $750 trillion dollars? Or was it $750,000? Same difference. Anyway, it's gone too. I'll get over it.

There's more. Organic agriculture is getting modest increases for research, transition and other items in the Senate. It's not near what the sector needs, deserves, or should be insisting on, but what little is there would evaporate.

We'll need a name for a Senate straight extension bill. How about The Cotton and Rice Fleecing of Taxpayers And WTO Litigation and Trade Retaliation Jackpot Act of 2007? Because cotton and rice would be the big winners. The only winners, actually. CBO's baseline says those are the only crops likely to get significant bucks over the next five years through the price-triggers that would be held over from the 2002 bill, topped by generous automatic subsidies we've written about. And without any pesky, tightened subsidy caps.

Does that bill pass the Senate, even in a pre-election panic? Even if it's packed into some honking omnibus that maybe Tom Coburn himself would be tempted to vote for?

I'm thinking no. I'm thinking there's a crowd of senators who will stand in the way, and I'm thinking there could be 41 of them. But let's assume I'm wrong and a straight extension does pass the Senate.

So we conference "extension" against the House bill? The discordant tax provisions in the House and Senate were already a problem. But now the House finance provisions will have to go (the Senate strongly objects as do House Republicans and the White House), and with them goes all the pin money Nancy Pelosi made Charlie Rangel give Collin Peterson on that side of the capitol. That leaves only the budget gimmick money (postponed spending) and funds gouged out of crop insurance companies (always a plus). Not near enough money to provide for the increases in nutrition, McGovern-Dole, conservation, specialty crops...and all the rest of the small shiny objects that, in the dim dawn following the House mark up, glinted like reform in the eyes of the Speaker. Or at least in the talking points someone handed her, which have long since burned to a crisp in the wildfire criticism that blackened the House bill even before it passed.

Does Speaker Pelosi then whip passage of a conferenced, status quo farm bill the way she whipped the subsidy lobby's bill this past summer? Does she make her caucus vote for that?

If so, the one sure thing that would come out of an extension bill-House bill conference scenario is this: front page, Category 5 political disaster for Democrats.

They might as well set up their '08 campaign headquarters in the Superdome.

Editorial writers at every paper in the country will lock the "Auto-Scorn" button on their keyboards (that's F666, btw). The San Francisco Chronicle will launch a new insert, "More Ways The Farm Bill Sucks Weekly." The farm bill will rise ever higher on the lists of failures that have dragged congressional approval ratings ever lower, ever closer, to single digits.

Or we could end up with a fresh chance on the House floor to revisit subsidy reforms and direct payment cuts, in order to make other priorities whole while reforming Title I. This time there would be fewer offsetting baubles to palliate a majority of the House. Maybe this time House leadership wouldn't kill a straight up payment limit amendment in the Rules Committee.

We might also have an opening to debate and amend a rice- and cotton-centric Senate "extension" bill with no real redeeming features for most senators. We might have another chance, on the floor, to impose the Dorgan-Grassley subsidy cap, and maybe a meaningful AGI limit; or a reinvigorated debate over shifting the only available money--direct payments--to shoring up food stamps, funding conservation, supporting specialty crops, and meeting other needs. We might get another shot at trimming even more of the subsidy fat out of crop insurance companies.

Hard to know what's in the cards when they're collapsed in a pile.