Washington --- Control of the Senate next year might well depend on agriculture.
Specifically, that control might depend on compromise farm legislation packed with issues and disputes important to battleground states in this year's key Senate elections.
The days of bipartisan farm coalitions in Congress appear to be over. Now the farm economy is just one more issue over which congressional Republicans and Democrats are ready to fight in an election year. A major battle in that fight is expected on the Senate floor this week, in debate over the farm bill, with six hours scheduled for both today and Wednesday. The House adopted the bill last week.
The bill, in terms of cost to American taxpayers, is nearly three times the size of President Bush's education reforms. But it doesn't command public attention the way other major pieces of legislation typically do.
The politicians, however, are keenly aware of the farm bill's importance. That's especially true in an election year in which races in a handful of states --- Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri and South Dakota --- could determine whether the Democratic Party maintains its one-seat majority in the Senate, its only legislative beachhead from which to challenge Bush's policies.
Consequently, incumbents and challengers alike want to appear farmer-friendly, even if their interests conflict with colleagues from the same party and even if it means turning their backs on the 1996 law that was supposed to usher in a new era in American agriculture by weaning farmers from taxpayer subsidies.
"In this election year, neither major political party wanted to risk being labeled as the anti-farm party," Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) complained last week. "Consequently, bidding was intense to satisfy the most vocal participants in the farm debate."
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) was one of the congressional conferees on the farm bill, a role that reflects the importance of the bill to his party and to him personally in the Senate.
Consequently, Daschle has made sure that the new farm bill will pour billions of dollars in subsidies into states that are important to Democrats this year.
For example, the new farm bill ends a quota system that props up peanut prices, an important crop in Georgia where Sen. Max Cleland, a Democrat, faces a tough re-election contest. But as compensation, farmers and others who own peanut quotas will receive 11 cents a pound annually for five years.
Cleland held off his endorsement of the farm bill until the peanut program was protected. But with that protection for Cleland came a less acceptable provision that would help three Midwestern Democrats also facing tight races this fall: Agriculture Chairman Tom Harkin of Iowa, Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. That provision calls for limiting each farmer's annual federal subsidy to $275,000, rather than the current $460,000.
The lower limit is preferred in the Midwest, a region with many small farms. But it is opposed in the West and South, where crops that are costly to produce, such as rice and cotton, are grown. And that presents a problem not only for Cleland but also for Democrats Max Baucus of Montana and Jean Carnahan of Missouri, as well as for Republican Tim Hutchinson of Arkansas.
Despite Lugar's chastisements, Republicans are just as likely to support the abandonment of their "Freedom to Farm" approach as Democrats.
For instance, Rep. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), running for the GOP nomination to face Cleland in the Senate race, has spent weeks traveling in his home state complaining about efforts by Democrats to "buy votes" with the farm bill.
But when the House voted on the conference committee report last week, Chambliss, a House negotiator with the Senate, was among the 280 who voted to send it to the Senate and on to the president. And in his debate remarks, Chambliss sounded remarkably similar to Daschle in promoting the "predictability" the bill brings to farm policy.:
