No Time for Semantics

When it comes to defending the horrendous hodgepodge of U.S. farm policy, Louisiana's Allen Ellender, 74, has long since learned that befuddlement is the better part of valor. Last week the Senate Agriculture Committee's twelve-year chairman had the unenviable task of introducing the Administration's 1965 farm bill. "I ask Senators," said he, "not to pin me down to too much detail." Would the bill solve the problems of U.S. agriculture? "If I were able to do that," allowed Ellender, "I would not be in the Senate. I would be Somewhere Else."

Somewhere Else was certainly the place to be. In congressional debates over farm policy, whose essential philosophy has long been accepted as sacrosanct, controversy generally rages over such red-hot issues as higher support prices for cotton and how to finance them. (They stayed at 30-c- a Ib. of which 9-c- for the first time will come directly from the Treasury.)

The most refreshing dialogue last week came on the last of four days of debate, when a group of disgruntled Eastern Senators introduced amend ments that would limit the amount of federal money any one farmer could collect. Maryland Democrat Daniel Brewster suggested the ceiling should be $10,000 a year, argued that Gov ernment support money "is actually encouraging big farms to grow more wheat, which is sold to the taxpayers at a profit." His proposal was beaten. Virginia Democrat Willis Robertson offered a proposal to raise the ceiling to $25,000 a year. That was beaten. Delaware Republican John Williams tried $50,000, and that was beaten.

Finally, an exasperated Williams proposed that no single U.S. farm operation should be paid any more than $100,000 a year in support funds. He reminded his colleagues of President Johnson's pronouncement that the U.S. farm program should be directed "to the small farmer who needs help most." Some corporate farms harvest "as high as $11 million a year from the Government," Williams said. "And I notice from the list that the Mississippi State Penitentiary gets over $175,000. I wonder how any state penitentiary could be described as a small farmer."

Williams lost his $100,000 amendment too--50 to 42. And the 1965 farm bill sailed through the Senate, written, as Allen Ellender put it, so that the farmers of the U.S. can "receive a fair share of our prosperous economy." Plainly, the Senate was in no mood for semantics.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.