LITTLE ROCK — U.S. Sen. John Boozman whines about mistreatment of Arkansas in the farm bill voted out of the Senate last week.
My thoughts return to a few heady months in 2009 and 2010.
A farmer’s daughter from Phillips County sat as no less than chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee.
This was a top-tier committee through which farm subsidies, nutrition programs and food stamps flowed. Even some environmental and high-finance matters, such as commodities markets, came under its jurisdiction.
Senate committee chairmen had near-dictatorial powers. Arkansas farmers had no worries.
This woman’s name, as I recall, was Blanche something-or-other-Lincoln, I believe.
But she faced a conundrum while seeking re-election in 2010.
Her chief asset, you see, was that she had achieved such loftiness in Washington that she could bring home the bacon.
But the people of Arkansas were convinced that the nation was headed to socialist bankruptcy because of Lincoln’s Democratic Party. The people of Arkansas seemed to believe that they alone could save the country from fiscal calamity by throwing her out and turning down her money.
So these fiscal altruists of Arkansas, these noble martyrs, embraced Lincoln’s opponent, the aforementioned Boozman. They did so because he vowed that he wouldn’t bring home any bacon.
I brought all this up in a debate. I asked Boozman whether he wasn’t asking the people of Arkansas to elect him on a promise to do less for them than she would.
Boozman tried to make the rhetorical issue about “earmarks,” meaning the sneaky way members of Congress insert a few million dollars into bills for special projects at home. But this farm bill is straightforward. And it’s a half-trillion dollars.
Lincoln was hamstrung in response.
She wanted to brag that she could funnel billions more into our state than he could. But that merely made her look all the more like a big government insider and profligate squanderer of tax money.
Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, breezed into Arkansas to announce that Boozman, if elected, would get put on the Agriculture Committee.
That is to say that a Kentuckian was inviting Arkansas to give up a chairman’s leverage in the primary area of the Arkansas economy. In exchange, the Kentuckian was offering us novice minority membership on this same committee.
Arkansas took the deal, 58 percent to 37 percent, a spectacular rout of anybody, much less an incumbent U.S. senator.
So here it is 2012 and Boozman is voting “no” on the farm bill because it spends less in Arkansas.
He assails the bill’s unfair passage in spite of his opposition. Thus he laments his own promised ineptitude.
The Senate bill ends direct payments or so-called price supports-a safeguard for low prices for rice and soybeans-and puts the emphasis instead on crop insurance. Then it caps crop insurance for the biggest farmers.
The effect is to authorize less aid to rice farmers in Arkansas who irrigate so thoroughly-and expensively-that they can survive the garden variety drought without tapping crop insurance for actual losses.
The bill redirects aid instead to Midwestern farmers more susceptible to natural weather conditions because their standard practices entail spending less to counter those conditions.
It is almost absolute that Lincoln would have kept those changes-whether right or wrong in the grand national scheme-from happening.
You ought to read some of the quotes from senators of both parties representing Minnesota and the Dakotas and Iowa and Kansas and Nebraska and Illinois and Indiana. They love this deal. They call it deficit-reduction, which means the best kind-somebody else’s.
These aren’t savings to the federal government. These are transfers of money out of Arkansas.
The real savings in the Senate farm bill? Those are in food stamps, of course.
It’s always the poor people who get cut. They’re used to it.
A postscript: Some wiseacre is sure to invoke that, in 2010, I wrote that I ended up voting against the Senate Agriculture chairman myself. I voted for a Green Party candidate. Lincoln had run an irredeemable and unimaginative campaign and was a goner at that point anyway. So I calculated that the Green Party candidate was as qualified as Boozman to get nothing done for the state.
But I’ll admit it wasn’t my proudest voting moment.
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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 06/26/2012