Republicans want to close a “hemp loophole” that they say has helped fuel a market of intoxicating hemp products, but they’ve been having a difficult time getting on the same page about how to proceed.

Kentucky GOP Sens. Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul found themselves on opposite sides of a proposal to address the matter before the Senate left for recess, forcing senators to remove a provision closing the loophole from funding legislation.

“I think there is a great willingness to solve that problem, but there's a lot of different ideas as to how you do it,” Senate Agriculture Chair John Boozman (R-Ark.) told The Hill shortly before senators headed home for August recess.

His comments came shortly after the Senate passed a bipartisan bill funding the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for fiscal 2026 — minus a proposal pushed by McConnell that sought to close a “loophole” that lawmakers unintentionally created in the 2018 farm bill, which legalized hemp production.

McConnell, who led the Senate GOP conference at the time, notably pushed for establishing the crop as an agricultural product. But in the years since, the senator has criticized companies he’s accused of “exploiting” the farm legislation by “taking legal amounts of THC (or tetrahydrocannabinol) from hemp and turning it into intoxicating substances.”

He and other Republicans have also cited the need........

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