Crop Failure: Why Congress Can’t Even Pass a Farm Bill
It’s a bipartisan ritual repeated a dozen times over the last 60 years: In exchange for Democrats agreeing to reauthorize commodity price supports and crop insurance for farmers, Republicans agree to reauthorize the food stamp program that helps feed 42 million low-income Americans.
That’s not to say that Republicans don’t use the opportunity of every “farm bill” bellyache about rampant fraud in the food stamp program or renew their demand for work requirements from able-bodied recipients. Like clockwork, Democrats chime in with complaints about “welfare” for undeserving “corporate” farmers and absentee landlords. And every five years, the various factions are somehow able to come together behind a compromise farm bill that passes both House and Senate with wide bipartisan majorities. Passage of farm bills was so routine, and widely viewed as so politically essential, that party leaders appended it with all manner of other legislation that could not pass on its own.
So it should tell you how deeply dysfunctional Congress has become that, more than a year after the last farm bill had expired, the least productive in Congress will gavel itself into oblivion in two weeks without a vote in either house on a new farm bill. Instead, a one-year patch to keep the programs operating at current levels will be quietly tucked into a “continuing resolution” to keep the rest of government open until the new Congress can get to it.
Nobody seems particularly surprised or outraged by this failure. There have been no apologies or excuses from party leaders or the chairs and ranking members of the “ag” committees. House Republicans, in fact, are patting themselves on the back for having delayed things long enough to sweep the table in the November election, which they fantasize will allow them to ram through a more conservative bill next year without having to negotiate with Democrats. For her part, the Senate chair, Democrat Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, who finally unveiled her 1,300-page proposal just before Thanksgiving, was boasting of how proud she was to be ending her 24-year Senate career without the stain of compromise blemishing her legacy.
Not that there aren’t serious disagreements to iron out. In an effort to “put more farm in the farm bill,” Republicans are pushing for a 10 to 20 percent increase in price supports, which they proposed to pay for by preventing a repeat of the 25 percent increase in food stamp benefits that the Biden administration engineered simply by revising the formula for what constitutes a healthy diet. Using the arcane math of congressional budgeting, Democrats denounced this as a $35 billion “cut” to the nutritional safety net (in reality, it would simply limit annual spending increases to the rate of inflation). For their part, Democrats insist on making permanent the billions of dollars a year in spending for conservation and “climate-smart” farming initiatives they had tucked into the lavishly funded Inflation Reduction Act.
These are the kind of differences that experienced committee chairs, serious legislators and professional staff could resolve in a week if they were allowed or encouraged by party leaders. But the single-minded fixation of leaders of both parties in both houses is on winning and keeping the majority in the next election, which for all practical purposes means not bringing up any legislation that might jeopardize party unity or make vulnerable members take a “tough” vote. By this perverse logic, doing nothing has become the preferred option on nearly every issue.
Having watched this process up close for the past two years, what I find most striking—and depressing—is how skillful Members have become in rationalizing their collective failure. When they are in Washington—which is less than 100 days a year—they are all very busy running around to caucus meetings and useless committee hearings, meeting with lobbyists and visiting constituents, or casting floor votes on partisan “messaging bills” that have no chance of passage. In this low expectation environment, what constitutes a success is “winning the day” on cable television and social media. After a few terms on this unproductive treadmill, the good ones just quit or get defeated for refusing the play the game, leaving behind partisan hacks and second raters so desperate to hang on to the job that they are willing to put up with all the nonsense.
Party leaders could fix this—but never will. Under the current dysfunctional arrangement, they’ve grabbed most of the power and initiative from members and committees. They have also convinced themselves and their caucuses that the gridlock will magically disappear when their party finally wins the White House and both houses of Congress and can push through an agenda so popular that they will be able to govern for a generation. In our evenly divided country, of course, that’s a fantasy, as Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump learned during their first two years in office.
The only way Congress is going to fix itself is for courageous Members from both parties confront their leaders and demand that they and their committees be given the opportunity to legislate again. Given the slim majorities in both houses, it would take only a small group of reformers to bring legislative business to a halt until their demands were met, as conservative hardliners have done in recent years. But unlike hardliners demanding enactment of their radical policies, these reformers would simply be demanding a genuine opportunity to propose, debate and vote on the kind of bipartisan compromises that most Americans say they want.
The greatest threat to American democracy isn’t Donald Trump—it comes from 535 Members of Congress who lack the political courage and seriousness of purpose to do their jobs.
Steven Pearlstein is a Senior Fellow at Penn Washington. He is also the Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University and a former Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post. The views expressed here are his own.