Prodding the Liberal Agenda With a Pitchfork

Climate change legislation was moving along in the House in June when it ran into a tractorcade. Dozens of farm-state lawmakers, led by the blunt-talking Minnesotan who chairs the House Agriculture Committee, blocked the way. It was a striking demonstration of agricultural interests stamping their imprint on key parts of the Democratic program. That may come as a surprise to those who thought the "farm bloc" disappeared sometime around the end of the Eisenhower administration. In fact, its clout has been reshaping -- and in some cases halting -- the ambitious agenda of President Obama and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). A bloc of moderate-to-conservative rural Democrats in both houses now holds the fate of health-care legislation in its hands. Meanwhile, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation's largest farm organization, has vowed to kill the climate change bill in the Senate. And last week, farm groups forced significant changes in food safety legislation by limiting the Food and Drug Administration's role in tracing suspected pathogens back to farms. You might call these newly empowered farm-state lawmakers the Agracrats. They're Democrats, all right. In the House, many of them are newcomers who defeated Republicans in 2006 or 2008. In the Senate, Democrats have 12 of the 18 seats in the central farm belt and northern Great Plains. And while their influence is hardly new -- over the years the farm bloc has fought off efforts to reduce farm subsidies and, in the 1990s, to raise gasoline mileage requirements for cars and trucks -- this latest rise of the Agracrats poses a dilemma for the Democratic Party. Rebuilding the urban-rural coalition that enabled Democrats to control Congress for most of the final two-thirds of the last century has been a major achievement. Last year, 49 House Democrats were elected in districts carried by the Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). But Agracrats are putting the needs of farmers, ranchers and rural communities ahead of party loyalty, often to the chagrin of more liberal lawmakers...WashingtonPost

They need to drop the pitchforks...and pick up a cannon.