Stunned and still divided by the failed vote last month on a five year, $939 billion farm bill, the Republican majority returned it to the U.S. House floor late Wednesday with one drastic, but sensible, revision: They divided it into two bills, one for farm programs and the other for food stamps.

Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., reintroduced the revised farm bill after conservative factions pressed for the split legislation.

The idea is to extract the federal food stamp program, which makes up about 80 percent or $751 billion of the proposal, and present it as stand-alone legislation. Separating the issues enables Congress to treat food stamps more like the welfare program it has become, without jumbling agriculture issues currently overshadowed by food stamps.

The White House immediately issued a veto threat, arguing the move goes against conventional wisdom as well as the farm lobby; both insist the farm/food stamp programs bundled together stand a better chance of passage than they do piecemeal.

However, the June 20 defeat challenges conventional wisdom. Many of the 65 Republicans who opposed the first draft said a 3 percent decrease in food stamp spending didn't go far enough, while a number of Democratic liberals who opposed it said the cuts went too far.

Throughout its history, the food stamp program has been under jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture. In its infancy during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the program helped small farmers as well as needy families; and back then, the number of active farms greatly outnumbered food stamp recipients.

Sixty years later, the balance has shifted dramatically: Now there are 101 million food stamp recipients — one-third of the U.S. population. There are many more food stamp recipients than farmers; more, in fact, than the number of Americans working in the entire private sector of the economy.

The tail now wags the proverbial dog: The food stamp program overshadows and diminishes a multitude of national priorities, not just agricultural ones.

And beyond food stamps, crop insurance emerges as the largest farm bill expenditure. An unexpected fact also emerges: The rejected House version of the farm bill would have spent more on crop insurance than the version backed by President Barack Obama and the Senate: Obama would have cut costs by close to $12 billion, while the House would have added about $9 billion. But when lumped together, the Republican cuts in food stamp spending masked the increases for crop insurance.

Clearly, the best way to evaluate both programs is to separate them. From a governing aspect, separating food stamps as a stand-alone issue is the way to go.

While Boehner and Cantor both voted for the earlier version, its defeat created a fault line between the two Republican leaders as the issue became a struggle for control of the House majority. Boehner's resistance appeared to soften Wednesday — the Associated Press reported earlier Wednesday he appeared ready to accept the split measures if Cantor can deliver the votes to pass both. Cantor was still rounding up support for the measure today.

Nobody would dispute these are complex issues. Most political issues are complex. But pulling food stamps out of the farm bill represents be a big step away from complexity and in the direction of simplicity.