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Follow us on TwitterWhen U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) died last month and U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) chose not to take Kennedy’s chairmanship of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, Iowa’s junior senator had a decision to make.
Sen Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., talks with a reporters in June 2008. (Lauren Victoria Burke/WDCPIX.COM)
Democrat Tom Harkin was chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, a powerful post for protecting Iowa’s economic interests, but a low-profile position nationally. He was next in line for the chairmanship of the HELP Committee if he wanted it, but he would have to hand his Agriculture gavel to someone else if he took Kennedy’s top spot.
A five-year farm bill was passed and signed by the president in 2008. An Iowan with strong ties to Harkin, Tom Vilsack, heads the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But even with those two aces up his sleeve, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin said leaving his position on the Agriculture Committee was a difficult decision. Ultimately, though, it fell to him to pick up Kennedy’s torch, he said Sunday in Indianola, and he took over the HELP chairmanship last week.
“It was a hard decision for me, but nonetheless one that I welcomed,” Harkin said.
“Keep in mind that I will still be on the ag committee. I will still be a high-ranking member on that committee. So, I’m not leaving the committee, I just won’t be the chairman of it.”
When the three senators with the most seniority after Harkin passed on the Agriculture post, U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, the daughter of Arkansas rice and cotton farmers and the youngest woman ever elected to the Senate, became the first woman to serve as chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. She is the first member of Congress from Arkansas to lead any committee since the 1970s, and the first Arkansan ever to lead the Senate Agriculture Committee.
Lincoln, who will now oversee agriculture and rural economic development in the Senate, had been seen as one of the most vulnerable Democrats going into the 2010 campaign, but that could all change with her newfound power. When her new position was announced, Arkansas News columnist John Brummett said that someone should pull a banner behind plane stating: “Y’all would be fools to fire Blanche Lincoln now.”
Lincoln is now uncommonly positioned to defend East Arkansas farmers’ interests when subsidy issues arise, as they always do, and as they inevitably will as this president of Lincoln’s party tries to find ways to get the deficit down.
She is uncommonly positioned to protect and serve the interests of the Arkansas poultry industry. And she is uncommonly positioned to try to do whatever is within the federal government’s might to save and revitalize her native Arkansas Delta.
The editorial team at the Arkansas Democrat Gazette opined that the only way Lincoln’s new leadership position could be more popular among Arkansans would be if she had became chairwoman of a High School Football Committee.
Iowa’s two U.S. senators — Harkin and Republican Chuck Grassley — both have spoken highly of Lincoln, who has proven herself in their eyes as a thoughtful member of both the Agriculture and Finance committees. But they also acknowledge that agriculture in Arkansas is quite different from agriculture in Iowa.
“The only thing that I can say — and she would understand exactly what I mean when I say this — she has different commodities and a broader base of commodities than what we have in the Midwest,” Grassley said. “And she and I have had some differences on capping farm payments to a certain class of farmers — those that would be average, we’d say. And she would say, ‘Well, you don’t understand the agriculture of the South.’ Rice and cotton is entirely different than corn and soybeans.”
Grassley said that he agrees with Lincoln 95 percent of the time on agricultural policy, and that he doesn’t intend to allow the 5 percent to jeopardize the working relationship he’s built with her. But, when asked this week if he agreed more often with Lincoln or Harkin on agricultural policy, Grassley was quick with his response: “Senator Harkin.”
Agricultural interests in Iowa have quietly voiced concerns that Lincoln may not be as strong an advocate for the upper Midwest as Harkin has been, but both Harkin and Grassley doubt that much will change for the worse.
According to Harkin, his decision to relinquish the chairmanship was made easier due to the farm bill being settled for three more years, former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack being in charge of the USDA, and the strong Midwestern presence that remains on the committee.
“We have a lot of people from the upper Midwest on that committee — so our grain farmers shouldn’t be too concerned about that,” Harkin said. “Our interests in biofuels — our interests in grains, corn, soybeans and the kind of infrastructure we have in the upper Midwest … believe me, I’m still going to be protecting it.”
And Harkin’s seniority means he has one more ace up his sleeve: Should it become necessary, he has the power to retake the chair of the Agriculture committee before the next Farm Bill is written in a few years, even if Lincoln and every other incumbent is returned to office in 2010.
