By Dan Morgan
Sunday, August 2, 2009
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.
Such demonstrations of pitchfork power have coincided with an effort by major farm organizations to raise their lobbying and public relations profile in Washington. Some groups, such as the Farm Bureau, have long had a strong presence. In the first quarter of 2008, for example, the bureau reported lobbying on 70 pieces of legislation; among other things, it sought to ease rules on animal cloning and opposed stricter air-quality standards for large dairies.
The rapidly expanding ethanol industry, with close ties to its suppliers, corn growers, has also added political muscle. Lobbying alongside farm groups for changes in the House climate bill was Growth Energy, a new group representing 51 ethanol plants, and Poet LLC, one of the largest companies in the Midwest "ethanol patch." In the end, the biofuels industry was one of the big winners in the climate bill. Existing biodiesel refineries, which run mainly on soybeans, were freed from greenhouse gas requirements of the 2007 Energy Act. And the ethanol industry got relief for at least five years from a proposed EPA rule requiring it to show that its use of U.S. corn isn't destroying forests and virgin soil elsewhere in the world.
But even after Peterson succeeded in revising the bill, Agracrat concern was so strong that 13 of 28 Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee voted against the legislation.
One opponent was freshman Rep. Walt Minnick (Idaho), one of only two Democrats elected to Congress since 1967 from a huge wheat, ranching and timber district. In explaining his vote, Minnick cited the concerns of farmers about higher costs, as well as "giveaways" favoring coal and heavy industry over hydroelectric and nuclear power. He was lobbied intensely before the vote by Pelosi and senior administration officials, but in the end Peterson told him to "vote your district," according to Minnick's spokesman, John Foster.
It's clear that, going forward, agricultural interests will press to either kill or further rewrite the climate change bill. The Farm Bureau, reflecting concerns of Southern rice and cotton growers, sees few advantages in the legislation. Peterson himself has said he will not vote for a final House-Senate compromise unless it includes further improvements and "meets my test for rural America."
Speaker Pelosi has actively courted rural America, and she has shown no signs of cracking down on the rural dissenters in her party. One of her first trips after taking office was to the annual meeting of the National Farmers Union, where she danced to the sounds of a Capitol Hill rock-and-roll band, the Second Amendments, in which Peterson is guitarist and lead singer.
The farm bill, enacted in 2008, was an early sign of Pelosi's support for rural interests. At Peterson's urging, she backed it even though it continued billions of dollars worth of farm subsidies she had previously voted against. In return, using his connections to the Blue Dogs, Peterson helped pass the Democratic budget plan in the House this year.
As head Agracrat in the House, Peterson has cast himself as a mediator, rewriting legislation to bring rural lawmakers on board. While many liberals smart at his activism, Pelosi has praised him publicly for helping pass the climate bill. And more accommodations may be coming on immigration and the administration's plan to help African farmers grow more food.
"We have never had an Agriculture Committee chairman get into other areas of jurisdiction on behalf of rural America the way this chairman has," said Michael McLeod, a Washington lawyer and lobbyist who served as counsel to the Senate Agriculture Committee in the 1970s.
Thanks to his committee's oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Peterson was instrumental in killing a proposal by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to merge it with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The CFTC has long been seen as a defender of farmers against manipulation in the grain markets. The issue also enables Peterson to hoist a populist torch against Wall Street speculation in derivatives and energy futures (to which ethanol prices are closely tied).
In the case of the food safety bill passed by the House on Thursday, Peterson worked behind the scenes to limit new FDA powers to make farmers keep records to help trace food-borne illnesses. And in regulating small growers and organic farmers, the FDA will now have to consider the impact the new rules will have on them.
All this shows that the Agracrats are a force to be reckoned with. When the Obama administration proposed phasing out a principal farm subsidy over three years for all except the smallest farmers, Peterson pronounced it "dead on arrival," then said, "We might cremate it."
Spoken like a true Agracrat.
Dan Morgan, a former Washington Post journalist, is a transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
