Farm Bill Failure Shows Ag Influence Decreasing

NYT:

Although a number of factors contributed to the defeat of the bill — including Speaker John A. Boehner’s failure to rally enough Republican support and Democratic opposition to $20 billion in cuts to the food stamps program — analysts said the 234 to 195 vote also illustrated the shift in the American population and political power to more urban areas.

“There are a small number of Congressional districts where farming continues to carry much sway,” said Vincent H. Smith, a professor of agricultural economics at Montana State University. “Especially in the House, the farm lobby has been substantially weakened.”

For much of American history, the agriculture sectors wielded tremendous political power. Farm groups were able to get key farm legislation passed by rallying millions of farmers in nearly every Congressional district. Influential farm state legislators like Representative Jamie L. Whitten of Mississippi, a Democrat who was chairman of the Appropriations Committee and its subcommittee on agriculture, brought billions in agriculture financing to their states and fought off attempts to cut subsidy programs despite pressure from both liberals and conservatives.

Actually, it shows that the total nut jobs in the Republican caucus, like Jim Jordan and Tim Huelskamp, are driven more by their religious devotion to tax cuts and spending cuts (and fucking over poor people [just like Jesus would want, I guess]), than they are to common sense, political sense, economic sense or most other kinds of sense.  I agree with them that direct payments are dumb, but their war on food stamps, right now, manages to screw over the Republican leadership and  give the Democrats political cover to take the high ground on those cuts, while these back bench idiots piss off one of the few constituencies Republicans still have left. .But that's what you get when the rich folks who run the party allow so many not very smart ideological loons to rise up so high in the party because they can count on their votes to degrade our civil society. 

Rural folks are also responsible for electing these morons.  Grain ag has had five or six of the greatest years in a generation due to the commodity "supercycle"/China/biofuel perfect storm.  As those narratives go away, many of the folks in these guys' districts will be hurting, and they just went and pissed on all the folks they'll need to help the residents of their districts out.  While regular folks in flyover country get hurt, the oligarchs these guys do the bidding of will be getting even richer. And the Jim Jordans and Tim Huelskamps of the world still won't understand whats going on.