The two sides are fighting over portions of the bill that allocate billions to food stamp programs. The bill the Senate has already passed reduces $4 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a deep cut that has Democrats upset. The House has signaled it will take up the two halves of the bill—farm aid and food assistance—separately.
That shreds a bipartisan legislative coalition that has existed since the 1973 version of the farm bill, when food stamp funding was added to the bill to attract urban Democratic votes to a bill that had, until then, mainly benefited rural communities. The stalemate is the latest sign that Washington has either forgotten how, or is no longer willing, to negotiate to build bipartisan coalitions.
It wasn’t always this way. Even as Republicans made inroads in rural districts once held by Democrats while Democrats came to rely more on urban and suburban states, the coalition between backers of farm subsidies and food stamps held. Those who negotiated earlier farm bills took as a given that both pieces were necessary to build the bipartisan coalition that would ensure passage. The 2008 farm bill enjoyed such widespread support that 99 House Republicans and 35 Senate Republicans voted with most Democrats to override George W. Bush’s veto.
Of course, some spoilsports, aka anyone who’s read an economics textbook, knows that farm subsidies—and basically any other kind of subsidy—are worse than useless. They direct resources into areas where they aren’t needed and take them away from areas where they are needed. We spend money making the economy less efficient! As for food stamps, well, I’m an agnostic on this one. Maybe we’re spending too much money on them. The program has grown enormously since 2008, but so has the population of the long-term unemployed. But the program ought to be debated on its own merits, not passed because it’s tied to farm subsidies, which ought not to be passed.
But Wilson is deaf to any considerations of policy or of cost. What this country needs is a dose of good old-fashioned bipartisanship, and damn the costs and the consequences! To this end, he quotes at some length former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. I admired Daschle on many grounds, but his role in farm legislation was not one of them. Following 9/11, he spend a great deal of time trying to cobble together a bill so outrageously generous to farmers that even George Bush wouldn’t sign it, but George was just as shameless as Tom, and poor Tom lost his South Dakota seat in 2004.*
Why can’t we get back to the good old days? Wilson quotes Brookings dude Thomas Mann as saying “The problem in the House is a Republican majority committed to oppose anything associated with the President.” But, of course, Reid can’t just blame one party. For one thing, that wouldn’t be bipartisan.
But the White House deserves some measure of blame, too. While President Obama has been frustrated by his inability to sell Republicans on elements of his agenda that borrow heavily from earlier Republican ideas—health care, the stimulus package and cap and trade legislation, to name a few—some Democrats are critical of his approach. Capitol Hill Democrats fault the White House for failing to negotiate with Republicans from a stronger position; by beginning with old Republican ideas, those Democrats believe, Obama gives away too many of his own bargaining chips before the real bargaining even begins.
Afterwords
I find it slightly amazing that Wilson doesn’t quote anyone saying that farm subsidies are bad or that food stamps destroy individual initiative. Is he entirely deaf to these issues?
*When Obama won in 2008, Tom expected to be a major player in the design of a national health care system, but had to bow out when it was discovered that Tom had been enjoying “free” limousine service from one his lobbyist buddies and not bothering to report it as income. Daschle was working as a lobbyist himself at the time, with a salary reportedly in the neighborhood of $2 million a year, which I guess is likely to make you think you are entitled to anything.
