Tag Archives: farm bill

national news

GOP House caucus stampedes lame-duck speaker

It’s no secret that the U.S. House of Representatives Republican majority at times can turn into an unruly bunch.

The TEA party faction, along with the arch-conservative Freedom Caucus, drove former Speaker John Boehner batty enough to make him quit.

Boehner’s successor, Paul Ryan, is getting the same treatment. The House Freedom Caucus helped torpedo a new farm bill for reasons that hardly anything to do with farm policy.

Ryan is a lame duck. He isn’t seeking re-election to the House from Wisconsin. Indeed, his speakership has been no picnic from the get-go. He now is finding it difficult to keep his own partisan troops in line, let alone getting any help from Democratic House members who don’t much like or respect him to begin with.

The farm bill got entangled with immigration, according to The Hill:

The House bill became inextricably linked with immigration after the Freedom Caucus demanded a vote on the conservative measureĀ as moderates neared the 206 signatures needed to force a vote on a separate immigration plan that falls well short of the proposalĀ pushed for by the White House.

Despite leadership offering the group of conservative hardliners a vote on the immigration measure in June, the members refused to back the legislation.

House conservatives seemingly want to poison an important aid to farmers and ranchers with an issue that ought to stand on its own.

As for the speaker, he told the country he had to be dragged kicking and screaming to seek the job he now holds. I guess he meant it.

Speaker Ryan’s remaining time as the Man of the House appears headed for a rocky conclusion.

local news, national news, political news, State news

Political ‘leaders’ too often become ‘tyrants’

Jay Leeson, writing for Texas Monthly’s Burka Blog, wonders how Texas legislators can stiff their constituents in favor of an agenda being pushed by the state’s second-leading politician, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

He wonders if state senators, for instance, are working for the people who they represent back home or for the lieutenant governor.

Implicit in his essay is the question about whether Lt. Gov. Patrick is running the Texas Senate — a body over which he presides — with too heavy a hand.

Read the essay here.

Indeed, we see this developing all too often. Politicians attain positions of power thanks to the votes of their fellow politicians and then decide that their voice is more important than anyone else’s. It’s a bipartisan affliction that crosses party lines.

A notable Texas politician, Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson, was famous for corralling fellow senators, getting right into their faces and “persuading” them to vote for a bill of his choosing … or else pay the consequences.

Another brief story involves another Texas pol, former Republican U.S. Rep. Larry Combest of Lubbock, who once refused in the 1990s to support legislation dramatically overhauling the nation’s farm program. House Speaker Newt Gingrich wanted him to support it, and pressured him to do so. Combest refused because he said it would do harm to the West Texas farmers and ranchers who sent him to Congress in the first place.

This dance is occurring now in Washington, D.C. Republican leaders want to overhaul health care laws. They have developed an alternative to the Affordable Care Act that has been getting some seriously angry reviews among voters in congressional districts and states all over the country. Senators and House members are hearing about it, too.

Do they vote for their constituents’ interests or the interests of the party leadership?

Democrats exerted the same pressure on their congressional members when they pushed for passage of the ACA in 2010. The law was unpopular out here in the land, but Democratic congressional leaders insisted on approving it. The ACA’s fortunes have turned; Americans want to keep it and they favor it over the alternative that Republicans are trying to shove down our throats.

But GOP congressional leaders won’t be persuaded by silly notions about public opinion or the principle of representing the desires of the “bosses,” voters who elect them — or who can unelect them if they are given the chance.

Political leadership — whether in Austin or Washington — is vulnerable to those who turn it into tyranny.

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Do as we say, not as we do

What a revoltin’ development!

It turns out that five men seeking to become Texas’s next agriculture commissioner all are highly critical of federal “intrusion” into state affairs, all the while taking money from those dreaded feds in the form of farm subsidies.

Who knew?

http://www.texastribune.org/2014/02/14/farm-subisides-go-anti-federal-govt-candidiates/

The Texas Tribune reports that the five Republican ag commissioner candidates received $1.3 million in payments from the feds during the past 20 years.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

President Obama recently signed the new farm bill into law, which reduces aid for food stamp recipients by $8 billion. Two of the GOP candidates, Sid Miller and Eric Opiela, said the food stamps cuts didn’t go far enough, according to the Tribune.

Miller told the Tribune that he favors “good legislation, not expedient legislation,” and that the farm bill fails the “good” standard.

He and several other candidates said they would have voted against the farm bill. I wonder.

A fellow with some farm and legislative experience of his own, former Democratic U.S. Rep. Charles Stenholm, sees it differently. “I’ve had this request made to me many times. Farmers say, ‘Charlie, just separate the farm portion from the food stamp portion.’ I say, great, we’ll have no farm bill,” Stenholm told the Tribune.

The salient point, though, is that these individuals seeking to run the Texas Department of Agriculture are talking a good game but are playing a different one. I am fully aware that politicians of all stripes do one thing and say another. Hypocrisy doesn’t adhere to a political monopoly.

However, if you’re going to campaign on a pledge to keep the federal government out of the state’s business, shouldn’t you at least have the courage to reject the feds’ money when they seek to fatten your own bank account?