Dan Morgan -- Farm-State Democrats Are on the Rise in Congress

Climate change legislation was moving along in the House in June when it ran into a tractorcade. Dozens of farm-state lawmakers, led by the blunt-talking Minnesotan who chairs the House Agriculture Committee, blocked the way.

Only after Democratic leaders agreed to a raft of changes drawn up by Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) did the bill squeak through the House, 219 to 212.

It was a striking demonstration of agricultural interests stamping their imprint on key parts of the Democratic program. That may come as a surprise to those who thought the "farm bloc" disappeared sometime around the end of the Eisenhower administration. In fact, its clout has been reshaping -- and in some cases halting -- the ambitious agenda of President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

A bloc of moderate-to-conservative rural Democrats in both houses now holds the fate of health-care legislation in its hands. Meanwhile, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation's largest farm organization, has vowed to kill the climate change bill in the Senate. And last week, farm groups forced significant changes in food safety legislation by limiting the Food and Drug Administration's role in tracing suspected pathogens back to farms.

You might call these newly empowered farm-state lawmakers the Agracrats. They're Democrats, all right. In the House, many of them are newcomers who defeated Republicans in 2006 or 2008. In the Senate, Democrats have 12 of the 18 seats in the central farm belt and northern Great Plains.

And while their influence is hardly new -- over the years the farm bloc has fought off efforts to reduce farm subsidies and, in the 1990s, to raise gasoline mileage requirements for cars and trucks -- this latest rise of the Agracrats poses a dilemma for the Democratic Party. Rebuilding the urban-rural coalition that enabled Democrats to control Congress for most of the final two-thirds of the last century has been a major achievement. Last year, 49 House Democrats were elected in districts carried by the Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). But Agracrats are putting the needs of farmers, ranchers and rural communities ahead of party loyalty, often to the chagrin of more liberal lawmakers.

"The good news for Democrats . . . is that they now dominate the marginal districts," said Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "And the bad news for them is that they dominate those districts."

The Agracrats overlap roughly with the Blue Dogs, a formal caucus of moderate-to-conservative (and mainly rural) House Democrats. They share a prairie-populist wariness of Wall Street and Washington that has been heightened by last year's financial meltdown and the ensuing government bailouts.

Like the Blue Dogs, many Agracrats have reservations about the price tag of health-care reform proposals, and they have fought for money for rural hospitals and doctors. But they have mainly been mobilized by a recent series of White House and Democratic initiatives that would directly affect farmers, ranchers and the economies of rural communities.

The furious farm-bloc reaction to the climate bill approved by the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May caught Democratic leaders off guard. Rural lawmakers charged that the legislation would increase fuel and fertilizer costs for farmers, hurt coal-burning rural electric utilities and leave the Midwest's thriving biofuels industry vulnerable to regulatory restrictions by the Environmental Protection Agency.

"I can't vote for it, and I don't know anybody on this committee that can," Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-Iowa) told Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack during a House Agriculture Committee hearing in June.

The eventual result was a bill more to the liking of agriculture. Not only did it exempt agriculture from having to cut greenhouse gas emissions, it allowed farmers, ranchers and owners of timberland to earn credits for practices that reduce carbon. The bill also turned over management of the carbon-offsets program to the Agriculture Department, cutting the less farmer-friendly EPA out of the picture. "We don't want EPA anywhere near our farmers," Peterson said.