Let’s say you represent a farm state in Congress. Let’s say Arkansas.

Let’s say a group of your state’s leading farmers comes to see you.

These home-state farming leaders tell you that the pending five-year farm bill is not perfect. They say it’s weighted against Southern farmers and in favor of Midwestern ones.

But it’s better than it was a year before, they say. Now it’s been amended for rice growers, they say.

They can live with it now, they say. They can do business under it.

They need its certainty. They fear the unknown, or something worse, if it doesn’t pass.

So they’d like you to know that they want you to vote for the bill.

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Throughout history, or at least throughout the few decades during which I’ve followed such things, that kind of conversation has been decisive on farm policy for a member of the Arkansas congressional delegation.

You are freed to tell the leadership that you are an “aye” on the bill because-and here’s the usual quote-“my farmers say they’re all right with it.”

That’s shallow and provincial, yes.

Major public policy should be about more than what your state’s farmers find acceptable for their narrow interests.

But you were sent to Congress to represent these people-these toilers in the fields of rice and soybeans and cotton. No one else is representing them.

But someone is surely representing the corn growers of Iowa and the avocado growers of California.

Farming is still the foundation of much of your state’s rural economy.

The Agriculture Committee is where the serious policy is made. Your only choice is the bill already on the floor.

I suspect that most of us, if in Congress, would choose to do what the home-state farmers asked us to do.

But then there’s Tom Cotton.

This freshman Republican representing the 4th District of the southern half of Arkansas is either a man of studious integrity or wholly impractical extremism or-most likely-both.

He read the farm bill. He pored over it.

His extreme anti-spending sensibility was offended that there was money for food stamps in it.

By the spreadsheets he had put together, or that a conservative think

tank had delivered to him, Arkansas farmers weren’t getting a very good deal.

The economic effect on Arkansas is negligible, he asserted. The greatest gains are for the large farmers, not the small or average-sized ones. He is likely to try to explain all of that in a forthcoming oped guest commentary in this newspaper.

So, alone in the wholly Republican Arkansas delegation in the U.S. House, Cotton voted no on a bill that had passed the Senate decisively with the support of both of the state’s senators.

It turned out that Cotton’s no vote joined a few others from similarly inclined right-wing Republicans.

It also joined liberal Democrats, mostly from non-rural states, whose opposition was grounded on a belief that the food-stamp expenditures that Cotton opposed as excessive actually represented damaging cuts and were less than what hungry Americans required.

And it turned out that, due to this unnatural and self-contradicting coalition, the farm bill didn’t quite pass.

I don’t know Cotton, having spoken to him in passing only a couple of times.

But I know people who know him and practically revere him for his integrity and intelligence and hard work.

I also know this much: You can be intelligent and filled with integrity and nobly committed to hard work and still be so impractical and rigid and strident in obsessive adherence to your ideology that you do a political disservice to your constituents and the country.

Impractically rigid and strident ideology is the precise problem in Washington. Well, it’s one of the precise problems.

Big money to insulate and bankroll those ideologies is the other-like the contributions that flow to Cotton from the anti-government Club for Growth.

In less than six months, Cotton has set up camp in the ideological right-wing fringe-opposing disaster aid from Hurricane Sandy, basically blaming President Barack Obama for the Boston bombing and now, faced with a direct choice, siding with his extremist ideology over a more common-sense vote in deference to the wishes of his affected Arkansas constituents.

Cotton is said to be the likeliest Republican challenger to U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor next year. So Pryor’s campaign is steadily compiling a thick file on Cotton’s fringe ideology.

Actually, Cotton is willingly compiling it for them.

You get the idea he thinks the only thing wrong with the file is that it’s not thick enough.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial, Pages 73 on 06/23/2013