Senate fails on farm bill again

The Senate Agriculture Committee failed to pass its version of the five-year farm bill last week because of an argument over nutrition funding. Majority Leader John Thune, R-SD, instinctively blamed Democrats for the 10-11 vote on the legislation already at least three years overdue. If Senators Mitch McConnell and Tommy Tuberville, both Republicans, had attended the defective legislation would have prevailed. They can count cattle in South Dakota but not senators.

Fortunately, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., led a charge to delay implementation of a rule that would force states to help pay for food stamps. It was another attempt to chip at the foundations of the nutrition safety net, which took a big funding cut in the Trump tax bill. They will attack school food programs, force bureaucratic red tape on poor parents just trying to make it, and try to pass the bill along to backwards states like Iowa where it gets plundered like they did with Medicaid.

Farmers were well cared for in the so-called Big Beautiful Bill. Crop insurance subsidies are protected. Ag disaster funding will be available for the ag disasters the Trump Administration creates. The farm bill is a shell of what it should be. If it is held up in defense of nutrition programs, let it dangle. The Republicans could get a farm bill done if they would let up on their mission to trample struggling working families.

Into the breach jumped Josh Turek, Democratic candidate for Senate, saying that the farm bill deserved to move forward. He was trying to sound like he is above politics. Instead, he sounded like he was okay with the steady assault on food security in the United States, and particularly in rural areas. He calls himself a prairie populist. George McGovern and Paul Wellstone were prairie populists, and they would stand with Sen. Klobuchar.

Rep. Ashley Hinson, Turek’s Republican opponent for the Senate, is a big part of the reason that the farm bill is three years late. The House wasted that time trying to bury food assistance programs against Democratic opposition.

Thune said that the senate would give the farm bill another try in September. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, does not expect a farm bill before the November election. He expects a compromise before Christmas. It may not matter anymore. Food and production agriculture were divorced in the Trump tax bill, where the spending parameters were set. The farm bill is not so important anymore. But when production agriculture needs support for crop insurance, urban politicians may not be there for them. The coalition that was forged by McGovern and the late Sen. Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, is shattered. It will take a long time to put it back together again.

The farm bill isn’t the only thing hung up in Trump’s Washington. An assessment of the toxicity of nitrate by the Environmental Protection Agency is stalled, if not dead. The assessment would have allowed the EPA to issue new guidelines on safe amounts of consumption of nitrate.

Food and Water Watch, an advocacy group, sued for records to illuminate why the assessment is being scuttled. The review was cancelled during the first Trump term, reinstated by the Biden Administration, and again held up in the second Trump term. The office charged with the research is being eliminated. The EPA last updated drinking water standards in 1991. Since then, science reveals that nitrate thresholds are about three times higher than they should be.

Polluted water is the top issue in Iowa this fall, followed closely by cancer. Both Zach Lahn, Republican candidate for governor, and Chris Jones, Democratic candidate for secretary of agriculture, concur on this and their polling backs it up. Iowans are making the connection between polluted air and water and their own personal health. Young people are afraid to have families for the health threats, and often are forced to leave the state for someplace healthier.

Jones was run off as a water scientist employed by the state. People thought he was some sort of heretic when he questioned how sacred corn ethanol is, when we are poisoning ourselves growing corn or complementary nitrogen-fixing soybeans on every last acre. Now they are waking up to the reality that everyone around them has cancer or Parkinson’s and nobody knows why. Could it be nitrate in the water? The EPA is not saying, and Iowa is barely even looking at the issue. The state took away funding for water quality monitoring when nitrate levels kept creeping up. Jones used to be in charge of it.

No data, no pain in the kiester, no problem.

What you don’t know might kill you.

Iowans do know that something is terribly wrong, and that is why Chris Jones, according to his own poll, is in a statistical dead heat with incumbent Republican Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig, former pitchman for Monsanto.

“This poll is more evidence for what we’ve been seeing on the campaign since January. Iowans are fed up with the status quo and ready for change. And that our message prioritizing clean water and diversifying our agricultural system is resonating with Democrats, Republicans and Independents across the state,” Jones said.

The EPA can’t hide the science. Iowa’s leading university researchers are telling us that nitrate is associated with various maladies, as are other common chemicals used extensively in agriculture. Airborne particles from crop and livestock production contribute to Iowa’s stunning growth in lung cancer since 1960, especially among women, and in the highest child asthma rates in the country. The epidemiology is all there, but the regulators don’t dare look.

If Jones gets elected, someone will bark relentlessly in the Iowa Capitol every day about pollution and cancer. Those beholden to the chemical companies will have to listen to him until their heads hurt. At least we could take some comfort in the affliction of toadies for conglomerates that would just as soon drink Storm Lake dry, nitrate and all.

Beware a constitutional amendment on the ballot this November that would require a two-thirds super-majority of the legislature to increase the individual or corporate income tax. It will force higher property taxes, sales taxes and fees (like fishing licenses) so the wealthy can run largely tax-free.

Iowa has been slashing income taxes and raising sales and property taxes for decades. The result is the poorest performing economy in the Midwest, and nearly the worst in the USA. Rich people are not flocking to Iowa, either.

Flattening the income tax at 3% plus frivolous spending on private school vouchers will result in a structural deficit of about $1 billion for as far as you can see — unless we continue to increase sales and property taxes, which fall hardest on the backs of working families. It would be foolish to make it almost impossible to increase the income tax. We will need to address that deficit within the next three years as state savings accounts are spent. An adjustment to income taxes may be necessary. Property taxes are already zooming out of sight.

Iowans for Tax Relief claims a survey showing over 70% support for the amendment.

Schools are cutting budgets. Highways 4 and 7 are in terrible shape, and are representative. Young people continue to flee the state because they can’t fetch enough income to tax.

We should not put the state in a fiscal straitjacket. Iowa probably will need the money sooner rather than later. The corporate class is trying to lock in its tax cuts with this constitutional amendment before the tab arrives at the table for the wanton spending of the Republican legislature. They hope to hoodwink the public — everybody wants a tax cut. The rich get the cuts while the working stiffs pay for the schools and roads, and for the deficits that these wastrels in the legislature are racking up.

Vote NO on the constitutional amendment. Do not put a fiscal noose around the neck of Joe Sixpack.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where these editorials appeared. His latest book, Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World, is available from Ice Cube Press. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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