THE WHITE HOUSE veto of the farm bill was bold and defiant, reflecting the strength and confidence of the president. The bill not only costs too much and imposes too many government controls, he said, but it’s also filled with “so much that would be detrimental to farmers,” their future would be put in jeopardy. “It would do harm to every agricultural region of the country,” the president said, causing large surpluses. “Thus it fails to meet the test of being good for farmers and fair to all our people.” Too bad this veto message didn’t come from President Bush last week when he instead signed the bloated new farm bill. No, those words were President Eisenhower’s as he vetoed the Agricultural Act of 1956. At the last moment, Bush considered a veto. His aides checked with congressional Republicans to find out if the bill’s price tag might be as much as $20 billion more than advertised. It’s costly, but not that costly, the White House was told. And even if it were, it was too late for a veto, the president having signaled repeatedly that he’d sign the measure. So, with misgivings, Bush went along. Three times, he called the bill “generous,” and he conceded “it’s not a perfect bill.” His weak explanation for signing it was: “There’s no such thing as a perfect bill.” There’s a lot more wrong with the bill Bush signed than a few imperfections. First, there’s the money. Depending on whose projections you use, it will raise farm spending by $73 billion to $82 billion over 10 years. The bill’s total cost is pegged at $457.8 billion, including $251.9 billion for food stamps. What’s worse is the attitude of Congress and the White House toward the increased spending that the bill reveals. A war is on and there’s again a huge deficit, yet Washington is back to its old ways, gorging on spending. The era in which big government was over is over. The bill not only increases spending for most existing crop subsidy programs, it brings back old ones that had been killed and even creates new ones. Remember the mohair subsidy, which became famous because one of its recipients was newsman Sam Donaldson of ABC? It was eliminated in the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996, which was supposed to wean farmers off subsidies altogether, but didn’t. Well, the mohair subsidy is back, along with the previously killed wool subsidy, thanks to the chairman (Larry Combest) and ranking Democratic member (Charles Stenholm) of the House Agricultural Committee, both from Texas. And thanks to the efforts of Democratic senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the honey subsidy has also risen from the dead. Is it crucial to America for these products to be federally subsidized? Of course not. Yet what’s alarming is how easily these subsidies were revived. The standard wasn’t whether they are necessary. Obviously they aren’t. It was whether the subsidies could be slipped into the farm bill, one way or another, while everyone is distracted by the war on terrorism. This is the old way of doing business in Washington: Feather your own nest–that is, your district or state–with as much of the taxpayers’ money as you can get your hands on. This practice, dormant for a spell, is now back in full flower. Republicans are almost as guilty as Democrats. For instance, they used the farm bill to present a gift to Ben Gilman, former chairman of the House International Relations Committee, who’s retiring. Onion growers in his upstate New York district have been clamoring for federal aid for years, and so has Gilman. The farm bill provides a subsidy. Gilman was duly appreciative. “This measure enables us to finally deliver the needed $10 million in federal assistance to our Orange County onion farmers, who have suffered year after year,” he said. Gilman is a capable congressman and a nice man. But should the farm bill be a vehicle for gifts? The onion program is not the only new one. Conrad was the key player in bringing about a subsidy for “pulse” crops–you know, chickpeas, lentils, and dry peas. A subsidy for those is designed to encourage farmers to rotate their crops. Crop rotation is a good agricultural practice. But hasn’t it been done for eons without a subsidy from Washington? Must farmers really be prodded at taxpayers’ expense? To no one’s shock, the farm bill is blatantly political. As Richard E. Cohen and Corine Hegland noted in the National Journal, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle made sure Democratic senators up for reelection this year were helped. Max Cleland of Georgia got a bigger-than-ever peanut subsidy. Tim Johnson of South Dakota wanted something called “country-of-origin” labeling on products–and got it. Tom Harkin, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, got a big, fat farm bill to brag about back in Iowa. What about President Bush? He could have kept the farm bill from becoming egregiously larded. Citing new economic circumstances, he could have called for a little belt-tightening. It was back in spring 2001 when Congress authorized the $73 billion increase in farm spending. At the time, the budget surplus was $5 trillion and no annual deficits were in sight. The economic slump changed things. By late 2001, the surplus had shrunk dramatically and deficits were foreseen. True, the White House complained about House and Senate farm bills as they were being drafted, saying they cost too much and didn’t meet the White House’s free-market standards. But Bush could have insisted Congress trim the $73 billion hike and not add programs. Against a good bit of evidence, Bush and his aides assert the Freedom to Farm bill with its market-oriented approach has not been reversed by the new farm bill. At last week’s signing ceremony, Bush said supplemental farm bills won’t have to be enacted every year, as was the case after 1996. The new bill, he said, “is generous enough to eliminate the need for supplemental support later this year and in the future.” We’ll see. The question is whether farmers and their allies in Washington have been sated or whether their appetites have merely been whetted. The answer, more likely than not, is whetted. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
