Is End In Sight For Farm Subsidies?

During his early years in Congress, Rep. Dick Armey railed against farm subsidies like Lear in a thunderstorm. He was loud, he was eloquent - and he appeared to be crazy. After all, no rookie, especially a Republican, messes with farm subsidies.

A few months ago, Armey sent around a “Dear Colleague” letter titled “The Peanut Program: Overdue for Termination.” The language was quieter than in the old days, but the sentiment was the same: The peanut program, like most other farm subsidies, “is just plain wrong.”

Nowadays, Armey can afford to appear kinder and gentler than in times past, when he was just another backbench zealot with an ax to grind. Today, Rep. Richard K. Armey, R-Texas, is majority leader of the House of Representatives.

His new bill to make the peanut program disappear has 94 co-sponsors and counting.

“The peanut program is inconsistent with personal freedom,” Armey said. “The timing is right to open the market up and restore consumer sovereignty.” Those are pretty slick words from the man who, five years ago, compared the House Agriculture Committee with “Al Capone dividing up Chicago.”

Unfortunately for farm subsidy supporters, 1995 is a farm bill year, when lawmakers dust off Depression-era programs, hold them up to the light and decide whether to let them continue.

Armey hates them all: the little ones such as peanuts, tobacco, sugar and honey, as well as the big ones for wheat, dairy products, cotton, rice, corn, soybeans and other grains.

During the 1990 farm bill debate, he wrote an article for the Heritage Foundation titled “Moscow on the Mississippi: America’s SovietStyle Farm Policy.”

“Even as ‘perestroika’ comes to the communist world, our own federal farm programs remain as American monuments to the folly of central planning,” Armey wrote.

You get the idea.

The conventional wisdom says Armey will win this year. The Democrats are out, and the GOP is in; socialism is dead, and the country can’t afford $10 billion in farm subsidies each year.

However, as Armey and others know, conventional wisdom most often is worth zip when it comes to agriculture. Farm-state lawmakers spend five years voting for other people’s legislation, then collect their chits on the farm bill.

And one nice thing about farm programs is they’re truly non-partisan.

For instance, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., represents the biggest peanut state in the country. Gingrich hasn’t said how he feels about Armey’s bill, and, as speaker, he won’t vote if he doesn’t have to. This will suit Armey just fine.

For years, Armey’s closest sidekick on farm subsidies was liberal Rep. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., leading the consumer crusade against fatcat farmers and their corporate pork.

They made quite a pair. Armey, the florid-faced bomb-thrower from the Dallas suburbs, is law and order, the flat tax and abolish half the federal government. Schumer, the smart-mouth lefty from Brooklyn, is Great Society, abortion rights and gun control.

Schumer said “there were very few disputes,” with each half of the team pursuing special hatreds along with their overall loathing. Schumer confirmed that Armey regarded peanuts as “the worst” because of huge benefits accruing to the fortunate few who are allowed to sell peanuts domestically at an inflated price.

But the duo always lost, competing against what Armey calls the farm-state “esoterrorists” who flimflam their colleagues with knowledge of programs so esoteric no one but an expert would bother to master them.

The heretics’ finest hour came in late 1993 when the House let stand a Senate measure to phase out and ultimately kill the $190-million-per-year wool and mohair program, which subsidized sheep and goat farmers so the United States never would run short of strategic material for winter coats.

This week, Schumer and Rep. Dick Zimmer, R-N.J., will present the anti-farm farm bill, with Zimmer replacing Armey, now spread thin with leadership duties, as GOP point man on overall program harassment.

But Armey is still there in spirit. Schumer and Zimmer may falter once again on the big overall bill, but surely, won’t the majority leader get what he wants?

After all, it’s only peanuts.

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