When Push Comes to Shove

The farm lobbyists who besieged Capitol Hill offices and the grain-belt Senators who staged a protest near the White House won their battle last week. The Republican-controlled Senate buckled under the pressure and joined the Democrat-controlled House in passing expensive credit-relief packages for farmers. Reagan aides, calling the fight a “sign of things to come,” predicted a presidential veto. Said White House Spokesman Larry Speakes: “The President is going to have his pencil sharp as far as any budget-busting bill is concerned.”

The drama was played against a background chorus of anguish from farmers. Rural politicians, representatives of agriculture organizations and even individual growers and dairymen wandered through the Capitol to plead for emergency assistance. The 105-member South Dakota legislature voted itself a special $95,000 appropriation to fly to Washington en masse for a day of lobbying. In Ames, Iowa, 15,000 people, many wearing bright green FARM CRISIS ribbons, jammed a midweek protest rally at Iowa State University’s Hilton Coliseum carrying signs reading FARMS, NOT ARMS and NO BILL, NO TILL. Back East, eight farm-state Senators led by Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin echoed their constituents with a demonstration of their own in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. Harkin had 250 white crosses planted to represent the approximate number of farms going out of business each day. “If this President thinks he can preside over the death of the family farm,” he said, “it’s not going to be a quiet funeral.”

Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole, who had been trying to stall action on the farm-aid legislation, gave in and let it come to a vote. Eight Republican Senators, seven of them from the farm belt, broke ranks and joined the Democrats in approving $1.85 billion in additional loan guarantees to farmers, plus $100 million to help banks reduce interest rates for farmers in trouble. In a second, closer vote, the Senate agreed to advance farmers 50% of the price-support loans they normally get in the fall, after crops are harvested. An infuriated Pete Domenici of New Mexico, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, called the second bill a “giveaway” that will benefit wealthy farmers as much as those on the edge of bankruptcy. Both Senate measures were passed as amendments to a $175 million African famine relief bill. Democrats in the House, in the meantime, easily passed separate legislation to provide the 50% advance on price-support loans plus $3 billion in new loan guarantees.

Dole, who had worked intensely to hold his fellow Republicans in line by arguing that farmers would be helped best by smaller deficits and lower interest rates, was disgusted by his colleagues’ action. “We haven’t demonstrated in the Senate that we’re prepared to face up to the deficit,” he said. “We’re adding a billion-plus dollars to our problem.” But four of the Republican farm-state Senators who defected on the Senate votes are up for re- election in 1986. Iowa’s Charles Grassley explained his dilemma: “I can’t turn my back on the farmers without turning my back on seven out of ten people in my state whose jobs are directly related to agriculture.” Dole himself did not really come off too badly from his early-season bruising on an unpopular issue. Said Montana Democrat John Melcher before the votes: “Politically, Dole needs to lose. He wins if he loses. He’s in the difficult position of performing his duty as majority leader for the President.”

The Democrats were delighted to have the Republicans cornered. They were so eager to get the farm legislation on the President’s desk that the House Rules Committee scheduled an early vote to approve the Senate’s version of the African relief bill without the usual House-Senate conference to resolve differences. Democrats hope to see Reagan in the awkward position of refusing to help farmers while lobbying in Congress for billions of dollars for the MX missile, aid to the contras in Nicaragua and military assistance to El Salvador.

But the White House was ready for a confrontation on farm assistance. The ! Administration argues that only 5% to 10% of the nation’s farmers are under severe financial stress, and that the expensive bills passed by Congress will not help truly needy growers before spring planting season. Agriculture Secretary John Block told the House Budget Committee that the assistance “is not going to be of any real benefit. It’s not good legislation, and we would not have time to make it work if it were.”

With more special-interest budget fights coming up, some Administration officials would prefer a veto to a compromise. Said one White House assistant: “We’re sending a very clear signal that we are going to be tough. It’s a more important lesson than whether we save ourselves some extra money on the farmers.”

At week’s end the President met with Iowa Governor Terry Branstad and offered one small concession on the agriculture problem: a 30-day extension on sign- ups for price-support loans, deficiency payments and other farm programs. In other meetings with congressional leaders and Governors, the President was as unyielding as his staff. At a tense session with Dole and other Senate leaders, he held to the line he had taken earlier in the week with the National Governors’ Association and refused to consider cutting defense or Social Security. “He didn’t budge or blink in any of his meetings with the leadership,” an aide reported. Remarked another White House official: “Now people are finally recognizing that they may have an immovable object before them.”