Nothing exposes the hypocrisy, perfidy, and corrupt nature of the people whom we regularly elect to congress than farm legislation. If all we had going for us was the virtue of our rulers, this would be 19th century Russia and we would all be serfs.
Jeffords wins.
The Cow Palace
Sometimes it's possible to embarrass even the U.S. Senate. So after
getting well-deserved abuse for a farm bill that subsidizes the richest
farmers, Senators voted 66-31 last week to cap subsidies at $275,000
per farm per year. But in the process some of them seem to have cut
a deal that would soak most of the poor mothers in America.
Not that the subsidy cap is all that big a reform; the vote was staged
mainly for political cover. The cap cuts only about $1.3 billion over 10
years out of a bloated $174 billion farm bill, and Indiana Republican
Richard Lugar points out it would affect all of five farms in his state.
But the cap did raise a howl in the South, where rice and cotton
farmers now get the biggest taxpayer payoffs. Which brings us to the
political scam afoot.
Turns out that three of the Senators who
voted against the cap are liberals Jim Jeffords
and Pat Leahy of Vermont and Jack Reed of
Rhode Island. Now, these are men who live to
attack the "rich." They routinely oppose tax
cuts on those grounds and they claim to bleed
for the poor, especially "the children." So why
would they vote to subsidize the richest of rich
farmers?
The answer is that these Northeast liberals
appear to have cut a deal with those
plutocrats from the South. With the overall
farm bill likely to pass the Senate this week,
Members are looking toward the
House-Senate conference to preserve or
restore their pet provisions. Mr. Leahy is likely to be in the conference
and is sure to look out for dairy subsidies. A fair bet is that he'll offer
an amendment to resurrect a dairy compact -- a price-fixing cartel
that, if instituted nationwide, would raise the price of milk by as much
as 26 cents a gallon.
He'll probably be joined in conference by Mississippi Republican Thad
Cochran, who wants to kill the subsidy cap. Nobody will be surprised if
Mr. Cochran suddenly likes the idea of a milk compact. So New
Englanders will vote to subsidize rich rice farmers in Mississippi in
return for Southerners voting to soak milk drinkers everywhere.
If this doesn't make you swear off dairy products, consider that a compact would just be a follow-up to
Tom Daschle's reward to Mr. Jeffords for putting Democrats in the Senate majority last year. The farm
bill already contains a $2 billion direct subsidy for dairy farmers. While Mr. Jeffords's New England
produces just 3% of U.S. milk, that region plus a few surrounding states are set to get 25% of the
subsidy -- $500 million.
A majority of the Senate understands this outrage. Yet every time a Democrat looks set to vote against
it, Mr. Daschle -- ever mindful of the Jeffords debt -- rides in to save it. Senators Mike Crapo (R., Idaho)
and Jeff Bingaman (D., New Mexico) offered an amendment to kill the direct subsidy last December
and they had 52 votes going in. By the time the gavel sounded, Mr. Daschle had arm-twisted several
Democratic freshman into switching their votes.
The spin on the farm bill is that it helps the family farm, but even after the subsidy cap most of the cash
will still flow to the well off. Likewise, the spin from New England Senators is that the cartels and
subsidies keep smaller dairy farms in business. This was Mr. Jeffords's line in 1997 when he created the
Northeast Dairy Compact, a program that mercifully expired last September and that he's desperately
trying to revive. Yet in the four years that compact was in place, New England lost 17.4% of its dairy
farms. In the four years prior to the compact, it lost 18%. The compact changed nothing, except the
change it took out of the pockets of milk drinkers.
All of which leaves President Bush facing some political embarrassment of his own. We're sorry to say
his Administration has all but surrendered on the size of the farm bill; Republicans are as cynical as
Democrats about this November's five key Midwest and Great Plains Senate races.
But if Mr. Bush signs a bill with the dairy compact in it, he'll have the pleasure of knowing that not only
did Mr. Jeffords cost his party Senate control, the President will have rewarded him for having done it.
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