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Economy-wide investments in our food systems can play a large role in both climate change mitigation and adaptation, but only if we move quickly and decisively, and choose wisely.

The time is now for the U.S. to follow the IPCC’s recommendations and make these economy-wide investments in our food system. This year, Congress will negotiate the most impactful piece of legislation related to agriculture, the 2023 Farm Bill, a nearly $1 trillion spending package that sets authorized funding levels for the next 5 years until the next Farm Bill is negotiated. NRDC’s Farm Bill priorities - advancing organic agriculture, increasing cover crop adoption, and reducing food waste – and the comprehensive Agriculture Resilience Act introduced this week by Congresswoman Chellie Pingree, who herself is a longtime organic farmer, closely align with the IPCC report’s recommended climate mitigation and adaptation options. The report outlines that to simultaneously reduce global GHG emissions by 60% before 2035 and adapt to changes that are already ongoing, we need to increase the ability of our agricultural systems to store carbon, effectively manage biodiversity, improve cropland management, and reduce food waste, all while preserving natural ecosystems.  

The massive overhaul that Booker was pushing for is not about poverty or sweeping financial change or racial justice, at least not directly. Booker’s focus is on the country’s food system and on farm policy, especially the massive, nearly half-trillion dollar legislation—esoteric to most Americans—known as the Farm Bill.

Every five years or so, the bill is re-upped after an increasingly lengthy and contentious battle that usually centers on the country’s nutrition support programs, which consume three quarters of the legislation’s funding. But this time around, as negotiations get under way and committee meetings take place on Capitol Hill, conversations are ramping up about American agriculture’s role in contributing to—and addressing—climate change.

The need to start a precipitous phase-out of oil, gas, and coal is more acute than ever, but federal legislation will remain out of reach as long as there’s a climate-hostile House majority. So, as the struggle against fossil fuels carries on in our states and communities, the quest for serious action in Washington on climate and ecological renewal will focus largely on the national push for a radically new kind of Farm Bill.

It is essential both to purge fossil fuels and to perennialize agriculture. No two policies are more crucial to preventing ecological meltdown.

You may not own a tractor or a single pair of overalls. And maybe the only thing you’ve had a hand in growing is a neglected, windowsill succulent. But if you think the farm bill has nothing to do with you, you’d be wrong.

“The farm bill is a massive omnibus authorization and spending bill that comes up every five years,” says Ben Thomas, who directs EDF’s agriculture policy work. “It sets all federal food, agriculture and nutrition support policy and touches almost every aspect of our lives.”

But policy accomplishments don't really help a president much in terms of popularity. LBJ wasn't popular because he signed Medicare or the Civil Rights Act. It works the other way around; he was able to pass those in part because he was popular in 1964-65, thanks to a very strong economy and public goodwill in the wake of the Kennedy assassination. Notably, all his Great Society legislation didn't help him out once the public got annoyed by the Vietnam War; his party lost many seats in 1966 and he chose to resign rather than face the voters' wrath in 1968.

Beyond that, to the extent productivity and popularity may be related today, they may run in the opposite direction. In a polarized political environment, a president's achievements are likely to generate as least as many enemies as friends. Take health care reform, Obama's signature accomplishment. No Democrat could credibly run for president in 2008 (or for many years before that) without health care reform being a top priority. That was the nature of the Democratic coalition for decades. Conversely, the Republican coalition had been organized for decades around preventing Democrats from enacting health care reform. Obama's efforts were bound to produce substantial pushback, just as Clinton's did twenty years ago. The passage of health care reform indeed exacerbated Democratic congressional losses in 2010, and may well have handed Republicans the House of Representatives.

The paradox for Biden is that the more successful he is at addressing the pandemic and the economy, the more difficulty he could encounter in building bipartisan coalitions to address other problems. Political Science 101 would suggest that if Biden gets credit for ending the pandemic and restoring a strong economy, that popularity should translate into greater political capital for other problems in the queue.

Political Science 301 offers a cautionary warning: Solved problems fade from view. Biden is appropriately addressing the issues voters care about. But if the pandemic and the economy evolve as expected, voters will quickly bank those successes and focus on thornier problems — like immigration.

Despite the relief plan's popularity outside the Beltway, it is unlikely that momentum from its passage will hurtle Biden into future legislative wins, Howell said.

“The idea that a legislative win begets a subsequent legislative win in this environment is probably asking for too much,” he said, noting the prospect of passing COVID-19 relief was higher than more hot-button issues like immigration or health care.

POLITICAL CAPITAL is crucial for any president. With it, he can win legislative victories; without it, opponents circle like sharks. For Joe Biden — after a solid second half — the issue is how he will spend his new political capital after the Democrats’ decent showing in the Nov. 8 elections.

WITH POLITICAL CAPITAL, Biden can afford to alienate his allies in organized labor; yesterday he essentially told Congress to intervene and end the railroad strike threat.

He was the top-ranking Democrat on the highly influential Senate Judiciary and Senate Foreign Relations committees for decades. Then, in 2008, Biden served as a sounding board for Obama on national security and foreign policy, according to The New Yorker. And in the Obama White House, Biden subsequently took on a foreign policy-centric portfolio and served as the White House proxy in Congress during contentious moments, like passing the 2009 economic stimulus package and avoiding the fiscal cliff.

Biden’s reputation as a dealmaker throughout his time in the Senate and as vice president was forged by his unconventional partnerships across the aisle.

A number of studies have shown that Congress considers current levels of presidential approval when passing legislation (Brady and Volden 1998; Cohen et al. 2000; Edwards 1980, 1989). Early studies were able to find correlations between approval ratings and success in Congress (see, e.g., Edwards 1980; Ostrom and Simon 1985). However, later research depicts the relationship between approval ratings and legislative success as more conditional (Canes-Wrone and De Marchi 2002; Edwards 1989). Supporting a piece of legislation championed by an unpopular president could ultimately result in negative consequences for members of Congress. If presidents propose legislation to Congress that is salient with the mass electorate and has higher levels of approval, however, then members stand to gain from supporting the president.9

On a similar note, the honeymoon period of a president’s initial time in office has been shown to increase the likelihood of legislative success (Beckmann and Godfrey 2007; Brace and Hinckley 1991; Farnsworth and Lichter 2011; McCarty 1997). Presidents lose their favorability with the public and with Congress the longer that they are in office (McCarty 1997), which is why they often push for significant legislative accomplishments early in their term. Members of Congress are uniquely aware of the public’s sentiments after a presidential election, especially because they share a common constituency with the president and are more likely to capitulate to a president’s agenda.10 Therefore, a president should receive more cooperation from members of Congress for their legislative agenda items earlier in his term.

The concept of political capital captures many of the aspects of a president's political authority. Paul Light defines several components of political capital: party support of the president in Congress, public approval of the president's conduct of his job, the president's electoral margin, and patronage appointments (Light 1999, 15). Light derived this list from the observations of 126 White House staff members he interviewed (1999, 14). His indicators have two central uses. First, Light's research reveals that they are central to the “players' perspective” in Washington. That is, those “in the game” view these items as crucial for presidential effectiveness. Second, they relate to many central aspects of political authority as defined by Skowronek. So on both theoretical and practical levels, the components of political capital are central to the fate of presidencies. The data here will reveal that presidents over the last 70 years have suffered from a trend of declining levels of political capital, a trend that is at the heart of their political authority problem.

Third, agenda-setting offers the White House the opportunity to highlight its priorities, how they are distributed across various policy issues, and in which way policies should be packaged (Rudalevige 2005, 437ff; Wayne 2009b, 317ff). Because the resources of any administration to lobby Congress are not infinite and the multiple political arenas are usually heavily crowded with myriad policy items and problems striving to be solved, the White House needs to prioritize its policy agenda. This involves, among other things, to select some issues over others, decide about their sequencing, how to pursue them, and how much political capital it wants or needs to spend on any given item. Therefore, the administration will focus on certain policies with more attention, on others with less, depending on the prioritization by the president but also upon other considerations, such as the overall density of the policy agenda or imminent pressures of the time. The trick is to not overwhelm Congress with the president’s initiatives. As Lyndon B. Johnson famously quipped, “Congress is like a Whiskey drinker. You can put an awful lot of whiskey into a man if you just let him sip it. But if you try to force the whole bottle down his throat at one time, he’ll throw it up.” (cited in Rudalevige 2002, 113). Thus, the failure to prioritize easily leads to overload of Pennsylvania Avenue with Congress at the one end, and to excessive demands and exhaustion for the White House at the other end. The rocky start of the Clinton administration underlines this argument: since the White House did not pursue a ‘rifle-approach’ to define clear policy priorities for its initial months and then execute them, it got lost in numerous legislative battles and mine-fields early on in its first year. Instead it followed a ‘shotgun-approach’ by addressing as many issues as possible at once leading to an overkill and chaos (Rockman 1996; `Sinclair 2000b).

The disconnect between this perspective and the Tea Party's has formed a fault line, causing numerous, highly charged political dustups. Foremost among these fights was the effort to defund Obamacare in fall 2013 and the subsequent government shutdown. But other fights — for instance, the attempt to reform the farm bill's massive agricultural subsidies or to transform the federal transportation system rather than bail out the Highway Trust Fund — have followed in the same pattern: The Tea Party has forced establishment Republicans into public debates over proposals unlikely to advance so long as President Obama is in the White House, and the end result has been the kind of temporary yet highly visible inaction that feeds perfectly into a media narrative of Republican obstructionism.

But inaction is not a necessary consequence of such internal divisions. Last year's debate over the border supplemental appropriation, for example, represented Tea Party-instigated conflict at its most constructive. From the start of the discussion about how best to address the border crisis before Congress's summer recess, House conservatives insisted that whatever border-security provisions Congress considered would be woefully inadequate unless passed in conjunction with language ending the White House's unilateral Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy that had drawn so many young migrants on the dangerous journey from Central America to the United States. Pundits warned of the consequences over a fight on a border supplemental, and as the week-long debate proceeded with no clear end in sight, the media asserted that Republicans would pay a price for leaving Washington without addressing the issue.

Farmers are a key piece of Biden’s overall strategy to slash greenhouse gases across the U.S. economy: American agriculture contributes about 9 percent of U.S. emissions, but in theory has the potential to more than offset its own footprint. Recent interest among farmers and buy-in from powerful food and ag industry groups are giving Biden a rare opportunity to enlist agriculture in his sweeping climate agenda. But the window for action may be limited as the new president’s political capital wanes and midterm elections draw closer.

The farm bill, officially titled the Agriculture Improvement Act, is a major agriculture policy bill that is passed every five years and subject to the influence of both parties. This year it will go before a GOP-led House and Democratic-led Senate — where it needs 60 votes to pass — with both chambers very narrowly divided.

Some of the most contentious areas in the climate arena pertain to whether Congress should be incentivizing climate-smart farming practices.

Food stamp legislation all but certainly had enough support to pass on a floor vote if the Ag Committee would have allowed it; President Johnson was even able to get a pilot “surplus commodities” program instituted administratively in 1962. Finally, to save the farm bill, the Southerners struck an agreement to build on the surplus commodities demonstration and include food stamps in the package. This arrangement was permanently enshrined in the 1977 farm bill.

“That historical contingency forever changed the politics of the farm and thus the direction of our country’s ag policy,” said Jonathan Coppess, the author of The Fault Lines of Farm Policy and the former administrator of the Farm Service Agency at the Department of Agriculture under President Barack Obama.

Title: Biden Isn’t Likely to Ban TikTok Before Next Year’s Election

Subtitle: The platform may be a national security risk, but it is also one of the best ways to reach younger voters.

WASHINGTON – Louisiana ranchers, sugar cane and soybean farmers cornered congresspersons and regulators last week as the Farm Bill began its legislative journey that will end on the president’s desk, they hope, sometime this year.

A group of Louisiana rice farmers are expected to be on Capitol Hill this week doing pretty much the same.

ENID, Okla. — Congressman Frank Lucas is back on the House Agriculture Committee that is going to be hard at work over the coming months drafting a new Farm Bill, to replace legislation set to expire Oct. 1, 2023.

The current Farm Bill has been in effect since 2018, and was a reauthorization of the 2014 Farm Bill, which was enacted when Lucas was chairman of the Ag Committee, Lucas said in an interview with the News & Eagle.

Johnson is a member of the House Agriculture Committee and intends his legislation to be folded into a farm bill that the committee will produce this year. Congress has a tradition of modifying SNAP benefits every five years in tandem with changes to farm subsidies. Republicans routinely demand stricter work requirements, but usually don’t get them.

McCarthy won the speakership partly by catering to members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, and last week the group laid out demands for the debt limit fight that included work requirements for an unspecified number of federal programs. The farm bill could get entangled with the broader spending fight.